Overview
In this paper, we introduce an active inference model of ant colony foraging behavior, and implement the model in a series of in silico experiments. Active inference is a multiscale approach to behavioral modeling that is being applied across settings in theoretical biology and ethology. The ant colony is a classic case system in the function of distributed systems in terms of stigmergic decision-making and information sharing. Here we specify and simulate a Markov decision process (MDP) model for ant colony foraging. We investigate a well-known paradigm from laboratory ant colony behavioral experiments, the alternating T-maze paradigm, to illustrate the ability of the model to recover basic colony phenomena such as trail formation after food location discovery. We conclude by outlining how the active inference ant colony foraging behavioral model can be extended and situated within a nested multiscale framework and systems approaches to biology more generally.
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Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- Colonies of foragers with no internal map of the T-maze foraged successfully using local pheromone-following and return-trip deposition rules.
- Colony size influenced per-nestmate round trips, apparently non-linearly, though the authors draw no generalization because key parameters were not varied.
- Each colony size quickly converged onto a characteristic range of the inter-ant distance metric.
- The model recovered basic colony phenomena such as trail formation after food discovery in the T-maze paradigm.
Methods
- Per-forager MDP formulation of active inference — Each simulated ant forager runs its own Markov decision process with A (likelihood), B (transition), and C (pheromone preference) components; the colony is not modelled as one agent.
- In silico alternating T-maze foraging paradigm — Simulated colonies search a T-maze in which the food patch switches arm every 500 of 2,000 time steps, with a decaying attractant trail pheromone.
- Inbound-only trail pheromone deposition rule — Foragers lay attractant pheromone only after finding food and returning to the nest, a strategy modelled on Formica red wood ants.
- Simulations of colony sizes 10, 30, 50, and 70 foragers — Ran 2,000-step simulations at four colony sizes and tracked round trips and a mean Euclidean inter-ant distance coefficient as colony-level phenotypes.
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