2008 Woodie Awards
Elliot creates 'buzz' over honeyB project
Alex Taddeo
Issue date: 4/25/08 Section: Senior Projects
Benjamin Elliott, a Computer Science major, presented a swarming beehive full of life and energy to a captivated audience at Senior Project's day, yet this was not the buzzing mass of insects we're used to. Rather, his beehive was on a computer, an artificial intelligence program designed to model bee behavior and decision-making.
The program, dubbed "honeyB", contained brightly colored polygonal figures representing bees of different caste and function and the honeycombs they tend. The virtual pollinators go about their business using a developing field of AI known as "swarm intelligence", which allows individuals to use a simple series of pre-defined rules in order to benefit the population as a whole. Bees automatically make decisions and change jobs depending on their current situation. Whereas using a central intelligence would take a great deal of processing power, honeyB automatically distributes the work among all the different members of the hive and eases the strain on the computer.
Elliott has had a general interest in bees throughout his life, and found their social structure made a perfect example for the swarm intelligence concept he was researching. Elliott had to contend with many trials during production of his program. The program runs in the breve simulation environment and was designed using "steve", a scripting language Elliott was relatively unfamiliar with, yet he was able to develop a stunning finished product.
The program can be used for such things as airport landing schedules, where computers would automatically relay data and chart the best course, and meteorology, a field always populated by chaotic new data. Not only does this aid the field of artificial intelligence, but Elliott said that it also could help biology researchers to better understand the nature of a hive, as all the variables of the virtual bees' life can be changed at will. He said that it could be of use to understand current problems plaguing bees that leave hives in chaos.
Elliott said that his experience as Pacific University had taught him a breadth of subject matter, and his project, it would seem, only added to his wide scope of knowledge. Elliott is pursuing an electronic copyright on his work and intends to release the source code at a later time, and is going to make himself known to potential employers throughout the following months.
The program, dubbed "honeyB", contained brightly colored polygonal figures representing bees of different caste and function and the honeycombs they tend. The virtual pollinators go about their business using a developing field of AI known as "swarm intelligence", which allows individuals to use a simple series of pre-defined rules in order to benefit the population as a whole. Bees automatically make decisions and change jobs depending on their current situation. Whereas using a central intelligence would take a great deal of processing power, honeyB automatically distributes the work among all the different members of the hive and eases the strain on the computer.
Elliott has had a general interest in bees throughout his life, and found their social structure made a perfect example for the swarm intelligence concept he was researching. Elliott had to contend with many trials during production of his program. The program runs in the breve simulation environment and was designed using "steve", a scripting language Elliott was relatively unfamiliar with, yet he was able to develop a stunning finished product.
The program can be used for such things as airport landing schedules, where computers would automatically relay data and chart the best course, and meteorology, a field always populated by chaotic new data. Not only does this aid the field of artificial intelligence, but Elliott said that it also could help biology researchers to better understand the nature of a hive, as all the variables of the virtual bees' life can be changed at will. He said that it could be of use to understand current problems plaguing bees that leave hives in chaos.
Elliott said that his experience as Pacific University had taught him a breadth of subject matter, and his project, it would seem, only added to his wide scope of knowledge. Elliott is pursuing an electronic copyright on his work and intends to release the source code at a later time, and is going to make himself known to potential employers throughout the following months.
Be the first to comment on this story