Army ants’ ‘living’ bridges suggest collective intelligence | Hacker News Reader

Army ants’ ‘living’ bridges suggest collective intelligence

kurzweilai.net

34 pointsca98am7915 comments

The world of social insects is filled with ideas for tackling resource tradeoffs of this sort. These are usually not signs of "collective intelligence", as much as they are a manifestation of good algorithm design, honed by aeons of evolution. In fact, we've successfully pinched and applied quite a few social insect resource tradeoff algorithms in computer science.

It's a marvel that we can actually understand these biological algorithms well enough to code them up. I wrote about an example of this in a blog post about EO Wilson's "Superorganisms" a while ago (http://corte.si/posts/books/superorganism/index.html). Bee hives need to find the right balance between foragers out in the field, and nectar producers staying home to work in the hive. They have an elegant way of doing this, that works even when each bee can only rely on local knowledge - that is, each bee makes a decision about what it can see around itself, without any global integrative intelligence required. The algorithm goes like this (see the blog post for more detail):

1 - Not enough nectar collectors in the field? If yes, and you also have immediate knowledge of a producing flower patch, perform the waggle dance.

2 - Is the flower patch rich or the weather fine or the day early or does the colony need substantially more food? Perform the dance with appropriately greater vivacity and persistence.

3 - Not enough active foragers to send into the field? Perform the shaking maneuver.

4 - Not enough nectar processors in the hive to handle the nectar inflow? Perform the tremble dance.

A variant of this algorithm, directly inspired by bees, has been used to balance resource allocation in server farms:

http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~ctovey/publications/papers/bee....

> not signs of "collective intelligence", as much as they are a manifestation of good algorithm design, honed by aeons of evolution.

What is intelligence, if not that?

Intelligence is the wrong word in this case. These are complicated emergent behaviours that arise from extremely simple rules applied locally and iteratively by each individual. There's no planning, forethought, or central driving will at play here.

If this is intelligence, then so is bone growth, which follows a similarly simple algorithm, is also honed by evolution, and is also inspiring real-world applications, e.g.:

http://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArti...

https://www.fastcodesign.com/1671102/a-3-d-printed-house-tha...

There's no planning, forethought, or central driving will at play here.

Do there have to be these things to show intelligence? Simple markets without central planning absolutely destroy central planning in terms of efficiency:

http://www.realussr.com/ussr/queues/

Maybe the intelligent, planning, ants were overtaken by the unintelligent ants :-)

The same could be said for neurons.

Probably best not to circumscribe 'intelligence' even if the ant example is as you suggest. What is planning, forethought or central driving? Braitenberg nailed this back in 1986 in his book Vehicles in which he describes simple toys showing 'increasing intricate if not always successful or civilized behaviour'.

See chapters (vehicles) on 'Foresight', 'Egotism' and 'Optimism'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle

Your immune system is a manifestation of good algorithm design, honed by aeons of evolution. It does not follow that it is intelligent.

That's true but not relevant.

Flip-flops are a manifestation of human design honed by millennia of design evolution. Tennis balls are a manifestation of human design honed by millennia of design evolution.

It does not follow that flip-flops are tennis balls.

But both statements above are still true, and their lack of equivalent properties is not an argument against their common history.

Though my post is consistent with your last paragraph, I see what you mean. My intent was to clarify that the common history is not an argument for the ants' behavior being considered intelligent, but you can rightly say that you never made that claim. Cortesi's larger point, that complex behavior can arise from a few simple and inflexible rules that do not deserve to be called intelligence, is not being contested.

Cortesi seemed to me to be saying something different: that ant behaviour was not intelligent, but merely nice algorithms honed by evolution. Which implies that intelligent is not nice algorithms honed by evolution. And since evolution is the only mechanism widely agreed to have produced intelligence so far (if we ignore divine intervention), I can't agree with that.

Ants can be though of as a super-organism. This makes them super interesting:

  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism
  - http://news.wisc.edu/17398
  - http://jn.nutrition.org/content/137/1/259S.short

as much as they are a manifestation of good algorithm design

Evolution can be thought of in this way:

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1869.abstract

These are usually not signs of "collective intelligence"

This is where I disagree. A collection of ants is >> one ant.

An organism is already an example of collective intelligence. Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) have the same mathematical description as a Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Each cell carries the same network topology and each network is linked to neighboring cells by cell-cell communication mechanism. The result is a large meta-network that controls growth and development and physiology. Some of these cells are neurons which are connected together in a new way and form a higher order network. In turn, so-called supra organisms are just neural networks which are connected to other neural networks through sensory signaling mechanisms. It's neural networks all the way down.

I heard ants explained this way once: the little bug is not an ant. The colony is one ant.

Douglas Hofstadter expounds on this[0] in Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid[1].

[0] http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-11-prelude-ant-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

I like to abuse plurals to say this:

The little bug is one ant. The colony is not "some ants" or "a bunch of ants"; it is an ants.

Similarly, you have one bee, and then you have a bees. (Though there are also species of solitary bees that don't form hives, so if you have a bunch of them in the same area then you do indeed have some bees there rather than a bees.)

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