Hey SIGAI, We're beginning our Unit 2 on Advanced Topics with a lecture on evolutionary computation by Dr. Annie Wu from UCF's Computer Science Department! She'll be giving the introductory lecture she gives to her graduate students in her Evolutioanry Computation course here at UCF. There will be no slides for this lecture so if you're curious to know, come out! It is going to be a great primer for our following lecture on neuroevolution. More about Dr. Wu: Dr. Wu is the Director of the Evolutionary Computation Lab at UCF and an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Find more here: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~aswu/
This week will be a short break from our NLP/CogSci papers. Ants are one of the few creatures on the planet that engage in two-way traffic just like us. By looking at how ants navigate their self-organized traffic systems, we can learn how to better organize our own homologous systems (such as intersections, roadways, etc.). This paper experimentally investigates the efficiency of ants navigating paths involving bidirectional movement, and found that ants are capable of a level of efficiency that is twice as high as humans' in equivalent scenarios. What makes ants so much better than humans at traffic organization? What can we learn from ants' organizational paradigms? Should ants be driving our cars instead of humans? These are some of the questions investigated in this week's paper.