The behavioral acts performed by individual workers are simple and limited in number, yet the behavior produced by the whole colony can be amazingly complex. The task confronting insect sociobiologists is to derive the complex patterns of behavior seen at the colony level from a knowledge of the interactions among colony members. Because it is regular, predictable, and easily observed and measured, nest construction is an ideal form of group behavior on which to attempt this analysis. In this seminar I'll describe our progress toward understanding how the components of nest construction behavior are organized and regulated. February 28 .
Social structures affect many human interactions.
We study the emergence of behaviors in an artificial ecology in which evolved players use expected payoffs to select partners for games of prisoner's dilemma. Each player has a finite state machine specifying its prisoner's dilemma strategy, and a genetic algorithm is used to evolve new players. Full cooperation is the most common behavior which evolves in our simulations, but many other behaviors, which rely upon interesting social network structures, also evolve. March 7 . Clint Sprott, UW Physics Department.