The trace-reinforced ants process does not find shortest paths

TL;DR

This paper investigates a probabilistic reinforcement-learning model for ant foraging, demonstrating that ants find shortest paths in tree graphs but not necessarily in other graphs, with convergence to deterministic limits shown via stochastic approximation methods.

Contribution

The paper proves shortest path finding in tree graphs, provides counterexamples in other graphs, and shows convergence of edge-weights to deterministic limits using stochastic approximation.

Findings

Ants find shortest paths in tree graphs under the model.

In some graphs, ants do not find shortest paths.

Edge-weights converge to deterministic limits despite reinforcement.

Abstract

In this paper, we study a probabilistic reinforcement-learning model for ants searching for the shortest path(s) between their nest and a source of food. In this model, the nest and the source of food are two distinguished nodes $N$ and $F$ in a finite graph $\mathcal G$. The ants perform a sequence of random walks on this graph, starting from the nest and stopped when first hitting the source of food. At each step of its random walk, the $n$-th ant chooses to cross a neighbouring edge with probability proportional to the number of preceding ants that crossed that edge at least once. We say that {\it the ants find the shortest path} if, almost surely as the number of ants grow to infinity, almost all the ants go from the nest to the source of food through one of the shortest paths, without loosing time on other edges of the graph. Our contribution is three-fold: (1) We prove that, if $\mathcal G$ is a tree rooted at $N$ whose leaves have been merged into node $F$, and with one edge between $N$ and $F$, then the ants indeed find the shortest path. (2) In contrast, we provide three examples of graphs on which the ants do not find the shortest path, suggesting that in this model and in most graphs, ants do not find the shortest path. (3) In all these cases, we show that the sequence of normalised edge-weights converge to a {\it deterministic} limit, despite a linear-reinforcement mechanism, and we conjecture that this is a general fact which is valid on all finite graphs. To prove these results, we use stochastic approximation methods, and in particular the ODE method. One difficulty comes from the fact that this method relies on understanding the behaviour at large times of the solution of a non-linear, multi-dimensional ODE.