Of ants and elephants
Asaf Shiloni, Noa Agmon, and Gal A. Kaminka
Investigations of multi-robot systems often make implicit assumptions concerning the computational capabilities of the robots. Despite the
lack of explicit attention to the computational capabilities of robots, two computational classes of robots emerge as the focal points of
recent research: Robot Ants and robot Elephants. Ants have poor memory and communication capabilities, but are able to communicate using
pheromones, in effect turning their work area into a shared memory. By comparison, Elephants are computationally stronger, have large
memory, and are equipped with strong sensing and communication capabilities. Unfortunately, not much is known about the relation between
the capabilities of these models in terms of the tasks they can address. In this paper, we present formal models of both Ants and
Elephant, and investigate if one dominates the other. We present two algorithms: AntEater, which allows Elephant robots to execute ant
algorithms; and ElephantGun, which converts elephant algorithms—specified as Turing machines—into ant algorithms. By exploring the
computational capabilities of these algorithms, we reach interesting preliminary results regarding the computational power of both models.
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