[MUD-Dev] Re: Idea: Hive-mind monster

[Michael Hohensee]

Derrick Jones wrote:
> 
> 
> First, by 'all act the same' I assume you mean this in the larger scale,
> and not literally.  (would be interesting in itself to create a truely
> single-minded race where all members attempt the same actions at the same
> time at different locations, but I wouldn't conscider that a hive
> mentality.)  To establish a hive mentality you need to disect the mind of
> its members into the Group Mind (information, abilities, and instructions
> shared by the hive) and the Local Mind (the stuff to which the individual
> alone has access), as well as create some mechanisms for a two-way
> exchange between the two.
> 
> Picture for example an ant searching for food.  The motion of the ant is a
> random walk, moving about and reacting to its surroundings with its Local
> Mind.  If the ant finds food, a bunch of other ants are on the scene
> shortly.  How?  The first ant somehow (last I heard the exact mechanism is
> still a mystery) communicates its location and the fact that there is food
> to the Group Mind, which then sends other ants over to aid the first in
> its food gathering.
> 

What happens is that said ant runs back to the nest leaving a chemical
train, which other ants follow to the food.  When an ant is simply
wandering about, it leaves a certain kind of chemical trail, so that it
can find its way back to the nest.  When it finds food, it simply
reverses and lays down a different trail. 

Interestingly, since the original path the ant took to find the food was
random, the path that the first ants take is just as torturous as the
path that the first ant took.  However, this path gets turned into a
straight line by a bunch of ants cutting corners on the turns :)

This might be a good way to run a simple hive mind.  Just have a variety
of tracer objects get laid down under certain conditions, and have
others in the hive respond to said tracers in a certain way.

>
> 
> Gunther

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Michael Hohensee       michael at sparta.mainstream.net
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