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rfmcdonaldSomething John said some weeks ago made my mind click when this blog entry twigged me on to this discovery.
Cephalopod intelligence is a form of intelligence that, while radically different in origin and manifestation from the intelligence of vertebrates, something comprehensible in that it’s the intelligence of a single discrete organism. The intelligence of social insects--bees, but also the related wasps and ants and the more distantly removed termites--is something outside human ken altogether. (I’m saying nothing here about bacterial communities, since their collective intelligence is much more limited. So it appears.)
The communities of social insects are dominated by strict divisions of labour, these divisions even extending to the point of biological specialization (workers versus queens, say), the labour of the community towards a particular going being dominated by self-organization driven by simple rules and trial-and-error patterns responsive to the environment. Wasps, at least, seem to possess long-term memory, a trait that individuals of other social insect species likely share. Swarm intelligence is at work in a single colony, not an intelligence that’s centrally directed but a property of the interactions of the community’s members with each other and their environment in certain specific ways. Swarm intelligence isn’t our kind of intelligence, but it can be a powerful form of intelligence indeed, even--as Lihoreau noted--inspiring human researches.
There’s just one thing. There’s a science-fiction short story I read some time ago, describing a traveler visiting an icy Earth-like world in a nearby planetary system that happened to host a failed colony. The world’s biosphere was fairly simple, dominated by worms which melted paths through the world’s glaciers, meeting with each other and parting with each other in certain suspiciously regular patterns. In the end, it turned out that these worms were not single organisms, but that they were actually individual elements of a great mind, the neuronal equivalents of a planet-wide megaorganism that was actually conscious but with a consciousness that functioned at a much slower speed than human consciousness. The individual bee may have a brain the weight of a grass seed, but there can be tens of thousands of bees in a single beehive. I wonder now, thanks to John.
Bumblebees can find the solution to a complex mathematical problem which keeps computers busy for days.
Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway, University of London have discovered that bees learn to fly the shortest possible route between flowers even if they discover the flowers in a different order. Bees are effectively solving the 'Travelling Salesman Problem', and these are the first animals found to do this.
The Travelling Salesman must find the shortest route that allows him to visit all locations on his route. Computers solve it by comparing the length of all possible routes and choosing the shortest. However, bees solve it without computer assistance using a brain the size of grass seed.
Professor Lars Chittka from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences said: "In nature, bees have to link hundreds of flowers in a way that minimises travel distance, and then reliably find their way home - not a trivial feat if you have a brain the size of a pinhead! Indeed such travelling salesmen problems keep supercomputers busy for days. Studying how bee brains solve such challenging tasks might allow us to identify the minimal neural circuitry required for complex problem solving."
The team used computer controlled artificial flowers to test whether bees would follow a route defined by the order in which they discovered the flowers or if they would find the shortest route. After exploring the location of the flowers, bees quickly learned to fly the shortest route.
As well as enhancing our understanding of how bees move around the landscape pollinating crops and wild flowers, this research, which is due to be published in The American Naturalist this week, has other applications. Our lifestyle relies on networks such as traffic on the roads, information flow on the web and business supply chains. By understanding how bees can solve their problem with such a tiny brain we can improve our management of these everyday networks without needing lots of computer time.
Co-author and Queen Mary colleague, Dr Mathieu Lihoreau adds: "There is a common perception that smaller brains constrain animals to be simple reflex machines. But our work with bees shows advanced cognitive capacities with very limited neuron numbers. There is an urgent need to understand the neuronal hardware underpinning animal intelligence, and relatively simple nervous systems such as those of insects make this mystery more tractable."
Cephalopod intelligence is a form of intelligence that, while radically different in origin and manifestation from the intelligence of vertebrates, something comprehensible in that it’s the intelligence of a single discrete organism. The intelligence of social insects--bees, but also the related wasps and ants and the more distantly removed termites--is something outside human ken altogether. (I’m saying nothing here about bacterial communities, since their collective intelligence is much more limited. So it appears.)
The communities of social insects are dominated by strict divisions of labour, these divisions even extending to the point of biological specialization (workers versus queens, say), the labour of the community towards a particular going being dominated by self-organization driven by simple rules and trial-and-error patterns responsive to the environment. Wasps, at least, seem to possess long-term memory, a trait that individuals of other social insect species likely share. Swarm intelligence is at work in a single colony, not an intelligence that’s centrally directed but a property of the interactions of the community’s members with each other and their environment in certain specific ways. Swarm intelligence isn’t our kind of intelligence, but it can be a powerful form of intelligence indeed, even--as Lihoreau noted--inspiring human researches.
There’s just one thing. There’s a science-fiction short story I read some time ago, describing a traveler visiting an icy Earth-like world in a nearby planetary system that happened to host a failed colony. The world’s biosphere was fairly simple, dominated by worms which melted paths through the world’s glaciers, meeting with each other and parting with each other in certain suspiciously regular patterns. In the end, it turned out that these worms were not single organisms, but that they were actually individual elements of a great mind, the neuronal equivalents of a planet-wide megaorganism that was actually conscious but with a consciousness that functioned at a much slower speed than human consciousness. The individual bee may have a brain the weight of a grass seed, but there can be tens of thousands of bees in a single beehive. I wonder now, thanks to John.
