"If a brain around 20,000 times smaller than ours can perform arithmetic using symbols..."
Posted on 02/06/2019 11:29:34 AM PST by ETL
If math is the language of the universe, bees may have just uttered their first words.
New research suggests these busybodies of the insect world are capable of addition and subtraction—using colors in the place of plus and minus symbols.
In the animal kingdom, the ability to count—or at least distinguish between differing quantities—isn’t unusual: It has been seen in frogs, spiders, and even fish. But solving equations using symbols is rare air, so far only achieved by famously brainy animals such as chimpanzees and African grey parrots.
Enter the honey bee (Apis mellifera).
Building on prior research that says the social insects can count to four and understand the concept of zero, researchers wanted to test the limits of what their tiny brains can do.
Scientists trained 14 bees to link the colors blue and yellow to addition and subtraction, respectively.
They placed the bees at the entrance of a Y-shaped maze, where they were shown several shapes in either yellow or blue.
If the shapes were blue, bees got a reward if they went to the end of the maze with one more blue shape (the other end had one less blue shape); if the shapes were yellow, they got a reward if they went to the end of the maze with one less yellow shape.
The testing worked the same way: Bees that “subtracted” one shape when they saw yellow, or “added” one shape when they saw blue were considered to have aced the test.
The bees got the right answer 63% to 72% of the time, depending on the type of equation and the direction of the right answer—much better than random guesses would allow—the researchers report today in Science Advances.
Though the results came from just 14 bees, researchers say the advance is exciting.
If a brain around 20,000 times smaller than ours can perform arithmetic using symbols, it could pave the way to novel approaches in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
There’s no hope for some of those. If you gave them brains the size of a bee or large, they’d just take them out and play with them.
Probably better than the college-educators and their prized bureaucrats who invented common core “math”; then forced it on the rest of the country...
That’s not arithmetic. They aren’t adding numbers. They have been trained to place one shape when they see yellow, remove it when they see blue. That, dear researchers, is not arithmetic. They aren’t adding or subtracting. Keep trying.
“That’s not arithmetic. They aren’t adding numbers. They have been trained to place one shape when they see yellow, remove it when they see blue. That, dear researchers, is not arithmetic. They aren’t adding or subtracting. Keep trying.”
You have been trained to add one when you see the +1 and take away one when you see the -1.
Live with it.
I thought bees got spelling.
Ten bucks says that a lion can tell if there’s one wildebeest or four.
Glad this was Australia, can’t imagine what this very important very needed study cost.
Scarlett R. Howard1, Aurore Avarguès-Weber2, Jair E. Garcia1, Andrew D. Greentree3 and Adrian G. Dyer1,4,*
1Bio-inspired Digital Sensing (BIDS) Lab, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
2Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale (CRCA), Centre de Biologie Intégrative (CBI), Université de Toulouse, CNRS, UPS, Toulouse, France.
3ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics, School of Science, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
4Department of Physiology, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia.
Exactly
Birds do it.
Bees do it.
Even educated fleas do it!.....................
LOL
Bees have been using exponential math and ultraviolet vision for eons. We have just figured out they can do simple math and see colors? Hey scientists! You guy still hold its impossible for Bumbles to even get off the ground as they fly away?
I understand many animals can comprehend up to 4 objects in a group but not 5 or more. Try this at home. Shake out 3 pills. Do you have to “count” them or do you just understand 3? Now try it with 5 pills and see if you comprehend them the same way you do the 3 or have to count them in your head.
subitizing
“Bees may have tiny brains, but they are surprisingly intelligent. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have conducted an experiment showing that bees can learn from their environment to gain a reward, and then teach other bees to do the same. But that’s not all they can do.
“I think the most important result in our case was that bumblebees can not just copy others but they can improve upon what they are learning,” said Olli Loukola, the first author on the study published Thursday in Science. “This is of course amazing for small-brained insects — even for us, it’s difficult to improve on something when we are copying others.”
In the experiment, the bees had to move a yellow ball into the center of a platform after the scientists demonstrated to the bees how to do it. Some bugs saw the ball move as though on its own, with researchers secretly moving it from below with a magnet. For other bees, the scientists moved the ball with a plastic bee on a stick. When the ball reached the center, the scientists added sugar water to reward the subjects.
Once the bees learned that the rewards arrived when the ball was situated in the right place, the bugs began to move the balls by themselves in subsequent trials.
The team then placed the trained bees on a platform with naïve bees. After observing the trained bees once, the untrained ones started to carry out the task, too. And not only did they copy the behavior, but the new recruits also improved on the action: They chose balls closer to themselves, even if the demonstrator bee picked a ball that was farther away.
“These are, high, high, highly intelligent creatures. They use their neurons in their brain as efficiently as any other animal on the globe,” said conservation biologist Reese Halter, who wasn’t involved in the study. “There’s little under a million neurons in a bee brain, which is approximately the number of neurons in one human retina.” ....”
I thought bees got maps...ie, directions
Because... college.
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