Re: [glob2-devel] Alleyways, and pathfinding

[Stephane Magnenat]

Hi,

I agree with your points ; I realised my proposed solution is too simple to 
solve the problem in all cases. I thus now have two remarks:
- I think your pheromone-based algorithm can work, but I'm afraid it will take 
even more memory than the actual gradients. Could you do some estimation for 
a typical map? It would be nice because it would make a starting point to 
discuss the algorithm in more details and it would help us to be sure that we 
have all understood it.
- I've been working a bit with ant biologists those last two years. Of course, 
ants uses pheromones, but:
        - ant solve congestion (up to a certain extent of course) by climbing 
on each 
others, they live in 3d not 2d.
        - ant do not always use pheromones, in some cases they use visual 
landmarks 
and memory so they navigation much like you and me. Indeed, using pheromones 
is slow because they have to touch the ground with their antennas to know the 
local chemical gradient. When using visual landmarks, they even sometimes 
carry another ant on their back. That's not relaetd to our problem, but I 
think that's funny and interesting :-)

Steph