The concept of ‘ant mosaics’ has been established to describe the structure of arboreal ant communities in plantations and other relatively simple forest systems. It is essentially built upon the existence of negative and positive associations between ant species plus the concept of dominance hierarchies. Whether this concept can be applied to ant communities in more complex mature tropical rai...

Context: Emergence is a term used to describe complex patterns or systems which are formed from very basic rules or agents. Once such example which has intrigued scientists across several fields has been ant colonies. Computer scientists are particularly interested in ant colonies as although each individual ant acts in a very simple manor, the ant colony as a whole is able to find shortest pat...

This paper describes GRAF-ANT (Graphical Framework for Ant Colony Optimization), an objectoriented C# framework for developing ant colony systems that we have developed. While developing this framework, abstractions that are necessary for ant colony optimization algorithms were analyzed, as well as the features that their implementing classes should have. During creation of these classes, sever...

The Arabidopsis AINTEGUMENTA (ANT) gene, which encodes an APETALA2 (AP2)-like transcription factor, controls plant organ cell number and organ size throughout shoot development. ANT is thus a key factor in the development of plant shoots. Here, we have found that ANT plays an essential role in conferring salt tolerance in Arabidopsis. ant-knockout mutants presented a salt-tolerant phenotype, wh...

We report a new Streptomyces species named S. formicae that was isolated from the African fungus-growing plant-ant Tetraponera penzigi and show that it produces novel pentacyclic polyketides that are active against MRSA and VRE. The chemical scaffold of these compounds, which we have called the formicamycins, is similar to the fasamycins identified from the heterologous expression of clones iso...

This paper uses ANT to trace the network-effects of two artefacts, an Android Tablet and an eBook as they are released into a newly formed e-learning actor-network (MobiLearn) inside a South African secondary school. Attention is given to the network effects on the identity and role of both tokens and how they in turn influence other actors inside the network. Of special interest is the effect ...

This paper introduces one of the most profound Swarm Intelligence-based approaches, namely Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The different operators in ACO and their effect on the quality of solution are briefly discussed. The ACO algorithms variants like Ant System (AS), Elitist Ant System (EAS), Rankbased Ant System (ASrank), Min-Max based Ant System (MMAS) are detailed. The paper puts forth a s...

We have used the metaphor of ant colonies to define "the Ant system", a class of distributed algorithms for combinatorial optimization. To test the Ant system we used the travelling salesman problem. In this paper we analyze some properties of Ant-cycle, the up to now best performing of the ant algorithms we have tested. We report many results regarding its performance when varying the values o...

Despite the rampant growth in technology-based service delivery options, the implementation of these contemporary forms of service channels continues to be risky and problematic for organisations. Current conceptualisations of IS implementation is rather narrow and highlights only particular aspects of this phenomenon. This paper adopts a socio-technical lens to enhance our understanding of the...

In this paper, an attempt is made to apply the African Buffalo Optimization (ABO) to tune the parameters of a PID controller for an effective Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR). Existing metaheuristic tuning methods have been proven to be quite successful but there were observable areas that need improvements especially in terms of the system's gain overshoot and steady steady state errors. Usin...