A single ant isn't all that smart. But a new study suggests an amalgamation of the diminutive insects -- or ant colonies -- can create intelligent networks that gather, spread and respond to a variety of information.
"While the single ant is certainly not smart, the collective acts in a way that I'm tempted to call intelligent," explained Jurgen Kurths, researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Reseaerch and co-author of the new ant study. "The ants collectively form a highly efficient complex network."
Of course, the intelligence of ant colonies isn't channeled toward producing reality TV shows or selling mortgage derivatives. Their information networks are primarily concerned with finding and gathering food.
Their intelligence lies not in the ants' strategy for finding food but in the colony's efficiency in honing in on a food source and leveraging its workforce toward a specific goal -- bringing the food back to home base.
When a single ant finds a piece of food, it heads back to the center of the ant colony, releasing a pheromone scent to mark the route. Because the pheromones quickly dissipate, the growing barrage of ants still look a bit chaotic as they track down the recently discovered morsel. But as more and more ants find the food, the line of ants from home to food and back becomes straighter and more efficient.
The study also found that as ants get older they get better at foraging, having acquired more information about their surroundings than younger colony members.
Kurths argues that the chaos-to-precision find and collect transition is quite similar to how Google's search engine works -- only he says ants are better at it.
"I'd go so far as to say that the learning strategy involved in that, is more accurate and complex than a Google search," Kurths told The Independent. "These insects are, without doubt, more efficient than Google in processing information about their surroundings."
Kurths' study was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: UPI