Ants vs. humans: Solving the piano-mover puzzle

"People stand out for individual cognitive abilities while ants excel in cooperation."

See full article...

 

[Fluppeteer]

According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, humans have superior cognitive abilities and, hence, would be expected to outperform the ants.

Oh, this is one of my favourite "I don't trust my source" statements of all time (I'd say [citation needed], but obviously there is one). I've met a number of humans for which I'd doubt it, as well.

 

[MarkHughes]

 

[Zeppos]

The humans where often restricted in communicating, and the article even states that when they could communicate they easily solved it. So this is nonsense.

I am a fan of non verbal communication. My son and I need little words to understand each other. It annoys my wife and daughter a lot. I bet he and I could get this done fast just by using eye movements. Maybe we need to throw in an eyebrow once or twice.

 

[Les Pane]

If you want to see a total breakdown of human communication, watch one member of a couple try to direct the other while backing a trailer into a tight space. Be aware that you may be watching the end of a marriage.

Or paddling a tandem canoe. They aren't called "divorce boats" for no reason.

 

[Veritas super omens]

About the same if we took away a human's internal neurotransmitter and hormonal communication. Not pretty. And we know this. Ant colonies die when that happens.

If you consider worker ants as individual organs in a whole organism, and their inter-unit communication to be over air instead of through aqueous solution (blood) or electrochemical channel (nerve), parellels can be seen.

My point exactly.

 

[dhughes]

Pivot!

 

[rfcavity]

Forming groups did not expand the cognitive abilities of humans? A ridiculous statement! So many great human discoveries have depended on the cognition of groups. I suppose this guy can design a cpu by himself with no classroom training, right?

 

[xeroks]

Nice article, but, "The wisdom of the crowd"? When was that ever a real thing? Crowds have time and again been shown to be utter idiots,

Only a crowd of social media managers could have come up with "the wisdom of the crowd" as an attempt to shine a light on the truth about humanity.

 

[NetMage]

Nice article, but, "The wisdom of the crowd"? When was that ever a real thing? Crowds have time and again been shown to be utter idiots,

Suddenly I’m reminded of people affirming the security of open source because of many eyes.

 

[bugsbony]

Guys, don't mix everything. There are lots of different ways of for a group of people to collaborate. This is only exploring a very specific type of group collaboration.

 

[basic pleasure model]

I was feeling a bit smug at first, as the article seemed to suggest we’ll have an advantage in the coming ant war. However, there are about 20 quadrillion ants…

 

[terrydactyl]

 

[DCRoss]

Or paddling a tandem canoe. They aren't called "divorce boats" for no reason.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii was the first game in the series which featured a simultaneous cooperative multiplayer mode in which up to four players would work together to solve puzzles and complete each level. The levels themselves were still based on the old Super Mario Bros. style and well suited to being solved by a single player.

The new multiplayer mode was regularly referred to as "Divorce Mode" for reasons which will be made obvious if you try to play it.

 

[Fluppeteer]

Suddenly I’m reminded of people affirming the security of open source because of many eyes.

Obviously compound eyes are the way to deal with bugs...

 

[Gigaflop]

Eusocial animals blur the definition of "organism." So do viruses blur the definition of "life."

Our cells work together because of chemical (and electrochemical) communication. So ant workers do the same. So what if inter-ant communication chemicals travel through air, where inter-cell communication travels through aqueous solution? So what if each ant worker is itself a collection of cells - each cell is a unit that itself communicates with its neighbors to function as a whole? We have multiple organs that could survive on their own for a while with the right support infrastructure.

Try to think of a hundred different ways life can succeed, and life has already thought of them and a thousand more.

I personally dislike the notion of "blurring definitions" because that implies the definition was accurate to begin with and these are outliers. The reality is that we like to categorize things into boxes but reality doesn't fit cleanly into any of them.

We created the boxes, and we do so with a limited understanding of reality and the limitation that boxes simply aren't well suited to cover all of reality. Love, emotion, intelligence, gender, species, life, race, organism, it goes on and on. Our definitions and classifications are fuzzy, imprecise but we use them because patterns are easier and simpler to deal with and the computational cost to not use them would be too great to function.

That said, it seems we largely agree.

 

[Paul_in_Maine_USA]

they're chord-ates?

book: Across the Bridge: Understanding the Origin of the Vertebrates -- Henry Gee -- Sold By: Amazon $3.99 Kindle
"the morphological chasm between vertebrates and invertebrates remains vast and enigmatic."

 

[Tomkellytak]

This is how to solve the famous "move the couch around the corner". problem

 

[Torbjörn Larsson OM]

The famous ‘wisdom of the crowd’ that’s become so popular in the age of social networks didn’t come to the fore in our experiments.

It is ‘wisdom of the [communicating] crowd’. It is easy to find crowd situations as e.g. traffic crowds where random factors play a large role, which it did for the ants besides internal and external (pheromone) memory.

The paper is long on analysis and short on results. This happens, but the reporting here and elsewhere is inflated.

 

[tomr]

Pivooot!