I’m reading something interesting from Sapolsky. It’s well-known that bees and ants have their own communication methods, through which they transmit information about where food is and in which direction. For this discovery, Karl von Frisch received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But here’s what’s interesting: when several bees return, who determines which one to listen to and why? Eventually, one option is chosen. Either the nearest or the best.
And here is what Sapolsky writes. It’s important that the better the food source found by a scout, the longer he performs one part of the dance — thus, information about the quality is conveyed. In the second phase, other bees fly randomly around, and if they bump into the dancing scout, they go and check the food source reported by the scout… and then return to dance the news themselves. Since the best potential source = longer dance, it is more likely that one of the random bees encounters a bee with great news rather than just good news. This increases the chances that soon there will be two dancers with great news, then four, then eight, until the whole colony converges on the optimal spot. And the initial scout with good news would have long stopped dancing, encountered a dancer with great news, and been attracted to the optimal solution.
Note — there is no decision-making bee who receives information about both places, compares the two options, chooses the best and leads everyone there. Instead, the longer dance attracts bees, who will dance longer, and comparison and optimal choice arise implicitly; this is the essence of swarm intelligence.
Similarly, suppose two scout bees find two potential places that are equally good, but one is twice as close to the hive as the other. The bee with local news will need half the time to reach its food source and back compared to the bee with distant news — meaning that the doubling of two, four, eight starts sooner, exponentially muffling the signal of the bee with distant news. Soon everyone will head to the nearest source.
Ants find the optimal spot for a new colony in the same way. Scouts go out, and each finds a possible place; the better the place, the longer they stay there. Then random wanderers disperse with the rule that if you stumble upon an ant standing on a possible place, it might be worth checking that place.
To add from myself: it is known that ants communicate using chemical signals – pheromones. When a scout finds a good place, they can leave a pheromonal trail leading to that place. If other ants follow the scout (or simply cross the path of that ant), they are likely to follow the trail, and if they also find the place acceptable, they enhance the pheromone trail, making it even more attractive to subsequent explorers. This creates positive feedback: the more ants visit the place, the stronger the signal becomes.
Then, a shorter path means a more strongly scented pheromone. Since they evaporate over time, ants choose the shorter path when given options.
To add from myself, likewise, lichens find their way out of mazes in a similar manner.
Higher quality becomes a stronger signal for attraction, which becomes self-sustaining.
There is a scientist, Deborah Gordon. In her work, she shows an additional level of adaptability: how far ants disperse, how much time they spend on a good site compared to a mediocre one, and so on. She shows that these parameters vary in different ecosystems depending on how abundant the food sources are, how scattered they are, and how costly it is to forage for food (e.g., foraging is more costly in terms of water loss for desert ants than for forest ants); the better a colony has evolved to tune these parameters perfectly to its particular environment, the higher the likelihood that it can survive and leave offspring.
It’s interesting how nature arranges everything.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 