Bees Solve Hard Computing Problems Faster Than Supercomputers [Science]

In a new study, researchers report that bumblebees were in a position to determine the best routes among several computer-controlled ” flowers,” quickly solving a fancy problem that even stumps supercomputers.

We already know bees are pretty good at facial recognition , and researchers have shown they may be able to also be effective air-quality monitors . Here’s another reason to keep them around: They’re smarter than computers .

Bumblebees can solve the classic ” traveling salesman” problem, which keeps supercomputers busy for days. They learn how to fly the shortest possible route between flowers no matter if they find the flowers in a distinct order, in line with a new British study.

The traveling salesman problem is an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-hardNP-hard (read: very hard) problem in computer science; it involves finding the shortest possible route between cities, visiting each city only once. Bees are the first animals to figure this out, in step with Queen Mary University of London researchers.

Bees need plenty of energy to fly, in order that they seek the most productive route among networks of hundreds of flowers. They navigate using angles of sunlight, which helps them find their way home, researchers say. To do that, their tiny brains must pack a convincing memory.( Old bees are more forgetful , in step with a separate study that came out last week.)

To test bee problem-solving, researchers Lars Chittka and Mathieu Lihoreau tested bees’ response to computer-controlled artificial flowers. They wanted to work out whether the bees would go after the flowers inside the order through which they were discovered, or if they’d work out the shortest route among the whole flowers whilst new ones were added. The bees explored the locations of the flowers and quickly discovered the shortest paths among them, in keeping with a Queen Mary news release.

This isn’t any small feat, especially considering bee brains are about as big as a microdot. On the subject of intelligence, size apparently doesn’t matter.

Earlier this year, researchers showed that bees recognize individual faces because they are able to make out the relative patterns that make up a face. The brand new research further suggests bees are highly sophisticated problem solvers, and that better understanding of their brains could improve our understanding of network problems like traffic flows, supply chains and epidemiology.

The research might be published this week inside the journal The yank Naturalist.

[ Queen Mary University of London ]

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This post is tagged: artificial flowers, facial recognition, queen mary university, queen mary university of london, study researchers, traveling salesman problem, university of london