BIOANT A Biologically Plausible Connectionist Approach to an Insect Simulation

The system BIOANT is designed to demonstrate the use of a biologically plausible artificial neural network in a system that simulates a home insect. The insect chosen for simulation was the so-called “ghost ant” (tapinoma melanocephalum), which may be found easily in Brazil and throughout the world. The species was studied and a number of features (body structure and behavior patterns) were extracted in order to simulate them by means of a computational system prepared to run on personal computer platforms. Special emphasis was given to the use of a biologically plausible artificial neural network as the control instance of each ant. The network was designed according to the following principles [5]: