Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Ants vs. Humans: Putting Group Smarts to the Test
0:40 min.
YouTube / Weizmann Institute of Science
======
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/ants-vs-humans-putting-group-smarts-to-the-test/
Ants vs. Humans: Putting Group Smarts to the Test
Cooperation worked better for ants than for humans in a Weizmann Institute experiment
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—December 23, 2024—Anyone who has dealt with ants in the kitchen knows that ants are highly social creatures; it’s rare to see one alone. Humans are social creatures too, even if some of us enjoy solitude. Ants and humans are also the only creatures in nature that consistently cooperate while transporting large loads that greatly exceed their own dimensions. Prof. Ofer Feinerman and his team at the Weizmann Institute of Science used this shared trait to conduct a fascinating evolutionary competition that asks the question: Who will be better at maneuvering a large load through a maze? The surprising results, being published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), shed new light on group decision making, as well as on the pros and cons of cooperation versus going it alone.
To enable a comparison between two such disparate species, the research team led by Tabea Dreyer created a real-life version of the “piano movers puzzle,” a classical computational problem from the fields of motion planning and robotics that deals with possible ways of moving an unusually shaped object – say, a piano – from point A to point B in a complex environment. Instead of a piano, the participants were given a large T-shaped object that they had to maneuver across a rectangular space divided into three chambers connected by two narrow slits.
[...]
Unsurprisingly, the cognitive abilities of humans gave them an edge in the individual challenge, in which they resorted to calculated, strategic planning, easily outperforming the ants. In the group challenge, however, the picture was completely different, especially for the larger groups. Not only did groups of ants perform better than individual ants, but in some cases they did better than humans. Groups of ants acted together in a calculated and strategic manner, exhibiting collective memory that helped them persist in a particular direction of motion and avoid repeated mistakes. Humans, on the contrary, failed to significantly improve their performance when acting in groups. When communication between group members was restricted to resemble that of ants, their performance even dropped compared to that of individuals. They tended to opt for “greedy” solutions – which seemed attractive in the short term but were not beneficial in the long term – and, according to the researchers, opted for the lowest common denominator.
[...]
Despite all the challenges of human cooperation, several authors successfully joined forces in this study. They included Dr. Ehud Fonio from Feinerman’s group in Weizmann’s Physics of Complex Systems Department, Prof. Nir Gov of Weizmann’s Chemical and Biological Physics Department and Dr. Amir Haluts, then a PhD student supervised by Gov and Prof. Amos Korman of the University of Haifa.
[...]
Cooperation worked better for ants than for humans in a Weizmann Institute experiment
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—December 23, 2024—Anyone who has dealt with ants in the kitchen knows that ants are highly social creatures; it’s rare to see one alone. Humans are social creatures too, even if some of us enjoy solitude. Ants and humans are also the only creatures in nature that consistently cooperate while transporting large loads that greatly exceed their own dimensions. Prof. Ofer Feinerman and his team at the Weizmann Institute of Science used this shared trait to conduct a fascinating evolutionary competition that asks the question: Who will be better at maneuvering a large load through a maze? The surprising results, being published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), shed new light on group decision making, as well as on the pros and cons of cooperation versus going it alone.
To enable a comparison between two such disparate species, the research team led by Tabea Dreyer created a real-life version of the “piano movers puzzle,” a classical computational problem from the fields of motion planning and robotics that deals with possible ways of moving an unusually shaped object – say, a piano – from point A to point B in a complex environment. Instead of a piano, the participants were given a large T-shaped object that they had to maneuver across a rectangular space divided into three chambers connected by two narrow slits.
[...]
Unsurprisingly, the cognitive abilities of humans gave them an edge in the individual challenge, in which they resorted to calculated, strategic planning, easily outperforming the ants. In the group challenge, however, the picture was completely different, especially for the larger groups. Not only did groups of ants perform better than individual ants, but in some cases they did better than humans. Groups of ants acted together in a calculated and strategic manner, exhibiting collective memory that helped them persist in a particular direction of motion and avoid repeated mistakes. Humans, on the contrary, failed to significantly improve their performance when acting in groups. When communication between group members was restricted to resemble that of ants, their performance even dropped compared to that of individuals. They tended to opt for “greedy” solutions – which seemed attractive in the short term but were not beneficial in the long term – and, according to the researchers, opted for the lowest common denominator.
[...]
Despite all the challenges of human cooperation, several authors successfully joined forces in this study. They included Dr. Ehud Fonio from Feinerman’s group in Weizmann’s Physics of Complex Systems Department, Prof. Nir Gov of Weizmann’s Chemical and Biological Physics Department and Dr. Amir Haluts, then a PhD student supervised by Gov and Prof. Amos Korman of the University of Haifa.
[...]
3 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
