Study: Bees are smarter than computers !
Bees can solve complex mathematical problems which keep computers busy for days, research has shown.
The insects learn to fly the shortest route between flowers discovered in random order, effectively solving the " Travelling salesman problem ", said scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London.
The conundrum involves finding the shortest route that allows a travelling salesman to call at all the locations he has to visit. Computers solve the problem by comparing the length of all possible routes and choosing the one that is shortest.
Bees manage to reach the same solution using a brain the size of a grass seed.
Dr Nigel Raine, from Royal Holloway's school of biological sciences, said: "Foraging bees solve travelling salesman problems every day. They visit flowers at multiple locations and, because bees use lots of energy to fly, they find a route which keeps flying to a minimum."
Using computer-controlled artificial flowers to test bee behaviour, his wanted to know whether the insects would follow a simple route defined by the order in which they found the flowers, or look for the shortest route.
After exploring the location of the flowers, the bees quickly learned to fly the best route for saving time and energy.
The research, due to appear this week in the journal The American Naturalist, has implications for the human world. Modern living depends on networks such as traffic flows, internet information and business supply chains.
In layman’s terms, such a computer can perform 16 billion simple arithmetic operations,such as adding two numbers, each second. In contrast, a conservative count of all the electrical and chemical events taking place in a bee’s brain shows that the lowly honeybee performs the equivalent of ten trillion operations per second. Amazing!
"Despite their tiny brains bees are capable of extraordinary feats of behaviour," said Raine. "We need to understand how they can solve the travelling salesman problem without a computer."
This is merely the latest in the subtle battle between bees and technology. Research in India seems to suggest that the dwindling of the world's bee population may be caused by cell phone radiation, which confuses the bees' sense of direction home.
However, if these London scientists manage to discover just how it is that bees are so clever, might some enterprising entrepreneur find a way to teach bees to code, thereby creating new growth opportunities among the bee population?
Now that would change the nature of the Valley, wouldn't it?
Archive for the ‘Bee Versus Computer’ Category
How smart is the common honeybee? Evidently, far smarter than today’s most powerful supercomputers. And they are marvel of miniaturization. One of the world’s most powerful computers can attain the amazing processing speed of 16 gigaflops.
In layman’s terms, such a computer can perform 16 billion simple arithmetic operations,such as adding two numbers, each second. In contrast, a conservative count of all the electrical and chemical events taking place in a bee’s brain shows that the lowly honeybee performs the equivalent of ten trillion operations per second. Amazing!
The bee does all of that while consuming a lot less power than the computer. According to Byte magazine, “a honeybee’s brain dissipates less than 10 micro-watts….It is superior by about seven orders magnitude to the most effecient of today’s manufactured computers.” Hence, over ten million bee brains can operate on the power needed for a single 100-watt light bulb. The most effecient of today’s computers uses hundreds of million of times more energy to perform an equivalent numbers of operations.
Yet honeybees do far more than the computers. They can see in color, smell, fly, walk, and maintain their balance. They are able to navigate across long distance to locate sources of nectar and then return to the hive and communicate directions to fellow bees. They are quite effecient chemists as well. They add special enzymes to the nectar to make honey. They manufacturing bees wax for use in building and repairing their hives. They prepare special food items, such as royal jelly and beebread, for their young. They protect their home by recognizing and repelling intruders.
Good housekeeper, they regularly remove garbage and other refuse from the hive. They control the climate in the hive either by clustering together for warmth in the winter or by fanning in the fresh air and sprinkling water during the summer. When their home becomes overcrowded,bees are smart enough to know taht the some have to leave. So they raise up a new queen for the old hive, and the old queen and many of the workers swarm establish a new colony. First, though, scouts are sent out to investigate a new sites. After these return and compare notes, so to speak, “streaker” bees lead the swarm to its new home. The lowly bees do all without any outside assistance or direction. They function independently. Yet, supercomputers require teams of programmers, engineers, and technicians. No contest! Bees truly are a marvel of miniaturization.
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