Tag Archives: gamboa2012

Ants Secret Code – Reveal

Earlier, I posted a video of leafcutter ants claiming that it contained a secret code. Well it’s true! Here’s how to crack the code, and how I encoded my messages in the first place.

 

Deciphering

The astute observer may take note that the ants carrying leaves only travel in one direction (towards the nest). In fact, this is the entire underpinning to the code. When I presented the puzzle to my lab, the response I got that was closest to correct was from Prof. Tucker Balch who stated that the first thing he would do is “chart the number of leaf carriers visible in each frame over time and look for patterns in that time series.”  Good thinking Tucker!

The first step is to create a signal out of the leaf-carrying ants. To do this, one can simply take the green channel of the image and adjust a threshold until just the leaves are selected. To get more exacting data you could try to apply additional filters like blurs, dilations, etc on top of this thresholding. You can even use professional video compositing software like After Effects and “key-out” the green color. These additional improvements are not really necessary however, you can stay pretty crude.

Next, because there might be some extra foliage around the edges, you will want to crop to a region of interested just around the ants.

Example image targeting just the green leaves from the video.

The video should now be entirely white (255) in areas where the leaves are present, and entirely black everywhere else. I then made a simple script that tallies up all the white pixels (detections) present in every frame, and it saves all this data as a CSV. When I pop open this CSV file in an open-source equivalent to Microsoft Excel, and chart the results, I get something that looks like this:

Ahh, that looks like it might contain some sort of signal. Now’s the time for the cryptographic skills. Your first intuition should be that Andy isn’t that big on cryptography, and will probably just use the first temporal coding sequence that comes to his mind, Morse Code. If one takes the slightly wider pulses to be dashes and the slightly narrower ones to be dots, you can pull out this pattern:

— .  –   -.-.  .–.  .-..

Or translated from Morse->English: GT CPL

The Georgia Tech Computational Perception Laboratory (where I work).

Yay! I also have some additional videos where the ants say a couple other messages like “Digital Media” and, of course, “Hello World.” I even made a special message to the class of my cool Biology teacher sister.  I will post them here when they are ready.

Both videos from this puzzle say exactly the same message, it is just that one, the first video, was recorded further down the stream which gave lossier data, so more human, visual intuition was required.  The reason this data was lossier will be explained below. Additional props go to DM student Rebecca Rolfe who uncovered the unintentional Rebus of the video, “Soon there will be no leaves left” (Get it? Get it? Ants are carrying all the leaves to the right….)

Encoding

How did the ants know how to communicate this message? Well they probably didn’t.

Earlier in the summer, I wanted to test Leafcutter responses to temporary barriers. It turns out that if the barrier is only there for a short amount of time (<1 minute), the ants will just sort of pool-up behind it instead of walking around (note, this is not true of other ants, like Army Ants).

To get more precise results, I built a simple servo-device controlled by an arduino which was attached to a fluon coated plate. While I was cutting-off, and re-enabling the flow of ants, I realized I could also program this device to send ant-based messages in this fashion. Thus after lots of experimentation, and a long hot day sitting in the jungle with my ant tollbooth, I found a workable formula for sending dashes and dots, and made the servo go up-and-down correspondingly to whichever message I wanted to send.

Of course, I wasn’t 100% certain that it worked until I got back home and analyzed it myself!

Leafcutter Ants Secret Code

The video below contains a secret message:

I’ll reveal the secret and how to figure it out on Tuesday, so you’ll have all of Labor day weekend to ponder.

First one to email me with the correct answer gets a prize (don’t email the whole list- serve and ruin the fun!).

First one to email me with how to arrive at the correct answer gets mild applause 🙂

——————————-
Hint 1: To work with the video, it may be easier to download it all at once. Just pop the link into http://www.savevid.com/

Hint 2: (don’t use the hint unless you have to!): This video is slightly easier to decipher:

Final Pipeline | Soft Metrics

Last serious trip on Pipeline. What am I filming? The road. Camera pointed down the road. Regular and HDR video.

Could be used for detecting Blue Morphos, but also sitting with and observing this slice through the forrest.

 

First thought is just boring. Dead forrest with an occasional jungle truck or Blue Morpho. But there are some decent soft metrics one could probably pull from this. This constant, jungle monitoring camera. Daily weather patterns, wind, leaves falling, sounds, tree movement, general movement along transect, traffic patterns.

 

Chased butterflies. Figured out how to make Hamatam army-ants retreat.

It was a different day knowing that these probes and pokes would be my last.

 

Thinking about how tracking shots on a dolly look so beautiful because they are a rigid, grammatical way of representing 3D information. Each tracking shot is the temporal equivalent of a gorgeous data visualization.

 

Thought up a possible full title for my thesis-

Digital Naturalism: Cybiotic Media and Digital Biocraft for Exploration and Dissemination

Ants Love Human Blood | Termite Rebuilding

6/21/2012

Let’s hurry up and get some facts down. Quick for memory.

Early to bed. Up at 7:30 but not going till 9. K_____

Just went to cecropia lot for last bits of footage, sugar water testing and termite rebuildings.

Turns out they can rebuild one of these tunnels within an hour.

Long-ish lunch discussing experimental ideas for Peter with Stephen. Back to parking lot. Tested whether ants prefered the taste of human blood over sugar water. They really seemed to like the blood.

Met with Yann returning from San Blas.

———–

Wanted to go to Bambi talk. It’s impressive how organized biologist are in this STRI commune. (http://www.stri.si.edu/english/about_stri/seminars/index.php)

The talk was all booked however. Peter said his roomate wasn’t going, so I subbed for him. Turns out that guy wasn’t actually registered, but when I showed up to the guard guy, my real actual name was on the list. (Of course I didn’t notice that until after I told him I was Willie, got awkward when I told him my real name was andy)

Got a ride in the boat.

Saw Ummat’s talk. One of the best I’ve been to out here!

Came back to record Kenro’s interview, and attend Victoria’s going-away party.

Long Day | DIY BioCraft Talk

6/20/2012 (recorded 6/22)
Long part of 2 day-long day.


Down at 330, Up at 5:30 for canopy tower visit. Saw blue cotinga.

 

All girls were super tired. They left to go sleep. I stayed in jungle for work. More army ants.

Found em, experimented with them. They were raiding leaf cutters. Pipeline road serves as a decent permanent transect. Elucidates animals corssing through the forrest.

Made it back (walking) around 1:30. Ate changed, prepped for my talk. Lots of mad rushing around. All the parts and projectors and arduinos i needed were somewhere else. The talk was a huge success though! Biologists seem easily impressed by decent presenting and have an impressive enthusiasm for attending these sorts of things. I’ve never really seen anything like it before.

 

 

Finished chatting at 6:45. Packed up, went with Peter to eat at 150B. Asleep at 10:45. Decided to donate my arduinos and prototyping equipment for the residents of gamboa. Hopefully they will play around with these things!

Bullet Ant Capture | The Ants Are Here.

Bullet Ants

With Marc Seid’s original plan of lifting a bullet-ant infected log into a container, and having several spotters, we successfully managed to collect and entire colony of Bullet ants! There were some hairy moments but we ended up with a full colony, queen and all!

Once we had them though, it was sort of tricky to figure out next steps. We kept them in the dish but quickly learned they were very strong and could escape most situations. We had to recapture them twice!

Caught 6:30 ride with Vauter to the Rio Limbo area of Pipeline. He drops me off from the truck and says the army ants are around here. He says this matter-of-factly. He drives off, I look down and there is a snakey, unilateral line of an army-ant raid at my feet. There they are.

 

Walked back to town around 11:00 am. Grabbed a ride with BAT GIRLS to bakery. Spanish was too shitty to order specifics so I just said, “Uno de todo.” Bag of delicious for $7.

 

Went to 2 talks at Tupper. Great talks. Fun chats after. Sushi and later Partying.

Long days, Do everything

6/17/2012|

————–

First morning  with official housing again! No longer homeless! Down 3:50 Up 9:00

Huge breakfast, work on robotic woodpecker. More random difficulties in making a portable servo motor behave like a woodpecker than I would have thought. Pays off though.

The Azteca ants respond like crazy! [Update Peter actually published some science about this]

Crazy lunch. Join Stephen Pratt in pipeline for army ant hunt. Find nothing. Great hike however! Go back home to the ridge to film our captured bullet ants. Watch fight club and write script for cecropia documentary with Peter. Get back to 150 to film bat girls experimenting with bat. I set up camera array and do my custom calibration technique. Since I’ve never actually worked with many multi-cam tracking systemes, I just dance in front of the cameras shouting numbers for long enough to hope that something i get is usable. Hit bed at 2:45.

 

Technojunglier | Shave a Tree

One of the biggest stressors faced by the Technojunglier is losing equipment. I find that 90% of things I lose actually stay with me in some form. Usually they are just hidden in nooks or lost in areas of quick decision placement (like when rain strikes).

It can be interesting when a seemingly innocuous peripheral is lost, for designing its replacement / or dealing the  consequences FORCE you into the mindset of this article. Forces you to understand exactly what the thing does, and why it was made this way and not that way. Puts you in the role of the thing. [Update thought, oooh what some Object Oriented Ontology up in here from losing things?]

 

Going hard and strong. Yesterday shot more Cecropia documentary footage. Shaved a tree, squirted it with nail polish remover. The ants seem not to bite as hard these days. For some reason I’m a little freaked out that I may be developing a tolerance to their venom. Walked to grab lunch. Paid cinco at a shitty shop. Pesco de seca. God it’s disturbing ho much more you viscerally recognize a person as more human, more like oneself when you understand what they say. Perhaps people of different languages should be barred from opening their mouths upon meeting. At least for a while. Can only share more universal communication like pantomime, gestures, or tones.

After lunch struck out for the interior jungle to do my Morse Code ants experiment. Insects, rain, and darkness crept in as I toiled, absorbed in my prototype. Decided to leave via a through-the-jungle route. Poor, ultimately adventurous idea. Blockages, flooding, disorientation, fatigue.

 

My cosmic guiding forces lead me to a steep viney bluff covered in garbage. I crawled up up and emerged muddy, with visible stink rays, in the back of a dinner party in the backyard of someone’s vacation home. It was across the street from

[end of entry]