A study of synthetic creativity through behavior modeling and simulation of an ant colony
P.S. Heck, Sukanta Ghosh · 2002
The objective is to scientifically study the nature of creativity by modeling synthetic creativity in an ant colony, simulating it on a computer system, and measuring its impact on performance through innovative metric design. In this study, two synthetic creative traits are introduced into select individual ants of a colony by imparting to them a foraging behavior that is radically different from the normal behavior. Analysis of the simulation results reveal that a creative trait coupled with the underlying parameters of the ant colony may cause the foraging completion time metric, i.e. the time to collect food from all sources, to be marginally better or weaker than the normal colony. Contrary to intuition, the completion time metric worsens when, in a fixed sized colony, the number of creative ants, relative to normal ants, becomes excessive.