ants-vs-humans-putting

Photo Credit: Weizmann Institute of Science: Ants and humans compete in maneuvering a T-shaped load across a maze.

I read about an interesting scientific study last week that I thought was worth sharing with my readers. Professor Ofer Feinerman and his team from the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) conducted a study involving ants and humans. First let’s just say that this was not a study on general intelligence; it is obvious from just the size of the brains that humans are much more capable of comprehending complex thoughts. Human brains contain over 86 billion neurons, whereas the ant has a mere 250,000.

There are two major differences that come out in the study; the first is that humans can thrive both in a community and in solitude. In fact, there are even some humans that prefer solitude over community involvement. Ants, on the other hand, not only enjoy community but cannot survive without it. When ants get lonely they lose their vigor, become incapable of digesting food and die within a matter of days.

The second thing they noticed in the study was that a colony of ants is far more capable in managing interpersonal relationships than a large group of humans. Exactly how were they able to prove this? Through scientific experiments.

To conduct the study, Tabea Dreyer created a real-life version of the classic “piano movers’ puzzle.” This is one of the first problems that is used to evaluate an artificial intelligence (AI) ability to solve relatively complex problems. The basis of the problem is to move an unusually shaped object, like a piano, through a complex path. In the experiment both humans and ants were required to move a T-shaped object through a simple maze, designed like a rectangle and divided into three chambers connected by two narrow slits.

The experiment was scaled to fit the appropriate size of the humans and the ants. While the humans’ participation was voluntary, the ants were tricked into participating by giving them morsels of sweet treats. Paratrechina longicornis, also called “crazy ants,” were chosen for the study. The experiment was conducted three times, once with a single participant (ant or human), once with a small group of six to nine participants, and a third time with a large group (80 ants, 26 humans). To give the ants a slight advantage the humans were restricted to only communicating verbally and with hand cues.

This is where the experiment starts to get interesting. When dealing with the awkward shaped object alone, the humans had the upper hand and completed the maze much faster than the single ant. However, as the group size increased, humans began to have a hard time completing the task. Humans gravitated toward “greedy solutions;” while some tried to do extra work to make it easier on others, some did less work; more than one tried to lead the group and confusion slowed the humans down. The ants, on the other hand, acted as a group. Feinerman describes it as “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The cognitive ability of the ants seemed to increase as they grew in number, whereas the opposite seemed to occur in the humans.

This proved another long-held theory – that an ant colony is like a super-organism, like a living body composed of multiple ants that work in cooperation with one another. Humans may perform way better than ants at an individual level because of our sophisticated intelligence and verbal communication ability, but at the collective level, ants are a step ahead.

This doesn’t come as a surprise to me, as we all know that humans are selfish and tend to always look out for number one. We tend to desire power and position, and maybe that is why we are so fascinated with studying things like ant colonies. You see we could learn a lot about cooperation by studying ant colonies and how they work as a unit.

Sadly, this is one of the reasons I fear AI. We have been programming AIs in a manner to prevent them from striving for power and control; as a result we may have created a super-intelligent ant colony. Imagine a colony of ants with the individual intelligence of humans, and that is what is soon to be the capability of AI.

I am also reminded of a Bible verse which, to me, this study gives a whole new meaning. Proverbs 6:6-8, “Go to the ant, you sluggard. Consider her ways, and be wise; which having no chief, overseer, or ruler, provides her bread in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest.” I always looked at it as if we should work hard like the ants to provide food and shelter, but maybe it is asking us to work together like the ant. Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@te**********.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.

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