from the honey-that-is-un-bee-lievable dept.
Even tiny brains can learn strange and tricky stuff, especially by watching tiny experts.
Buff-tailed bumblebees got several chances to watch a trained bee roll a ball to a goal. These observers then quickly mastered the unusual task themselves when given a chance, researchers report in the Feb. 24 Science. And most of the newcomers even improved on the goal-sinking by taking a shortcut demo-bees hadn't used, says behavioral ecologist Olli Loukola at Queen Mary University of London.
Learning abilities of animals without big vertebrate brains often get severely underestimated, Loukola says. "The idea that small brains constrain insects is kind of wrong, or old-fashioned."
Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/score-bumblebees-football-insect-social-learning
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @04:52PM (8 children)
Learning abilities of animals without big vertebrate brains often get severely underestimated, Loukola says. "The idea that small brains constrain insects is kind of wrong, or old-fashioned."
Fake News!!!
Stupid Insect Justice Warriors. Always getting worked up over stuff that doesn't matter and isn't true anyway.
If bees were actually smart they wouldn't be dying off. That's how you know they are stupid.
Loukola is probably just a bee herself, trying to keep down real americans!!!
(Score: 5, Funny) by VLM on Monday February 27 2017, @05:05PM (7 children)
Bees work hard and they don't share their honey profits with lazy bears without a fight. Also they're rural and hang out with farmers. Beekeeping seems relatively whiter than average. The average lefty isn't going to like bees, bees are basically really small rural white males and you know how the SJWs feel about those...
I think a better analogy for SJW that is bee related is the dreaded honey badger, they lay around and occasionally steal honey from the productive bees, and if they don't get their handout they trash their own neighborhood.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @05:08PM
triggered
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 27 2017, @05:18PM (1 child)
"really small rural white males"
LMAO - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy [wikipedia.org]
This link attempts to establish that there are about 4.5 worker bees (females) for each drone (males) - and of course, the queen is female as well. Bees are mostly female, and the males pretty much only serve one purpose in life. Serving the queen is what they are all about.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 27 2017, @07:14PM
A white male assuming the gender identity of a persecuted migrant minority in the current year; who ever would have guessed. Its not our place to judge, they can identify as little apache attack helicopters and pollinate whatever feels good. And WRT group politics, the queen of the hive is Not My President (tm).
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Monday February 27 2017, @05:19PM (3 children)
Seems to me like the bees need to rise up and have a revolution of the prolitariate, overthrow the queen aristocracy. Once deposed the hive can live happily ever after.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Monday February 27 2017, @06:09PM
That works for a little while, but then some girl bee wants to use the boys' bathroom, another starts hoarding a lot of honey, and then everyone agrees to blame all their troubles on any bee that doesn't seem to be the right shade of yellow...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @07:38PM
Worker bees can leave.
Even drones can fly away.
The Queen is their slave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @09:01PM
Actual bee society dynamics are different from a monarchy. The origin of the monarchy analogy is quite old and, in fact, its first enunciation spoke of a king instead of a queen. I don't have sources at hand for this because I merely attended a talk organized by some apiculturists.
(Score: 5, Touché) by DannyB on Monday February 27 2017, @04:55PM (5 children)
Why would tiny brains constrain insects?
Tiny brains have never stood in the way of humans achieving significant accomplishments:
1. Becoming Managers or CEOs
2. Excelling at Marketing, Sales or Advertising
3. Running for and even being elected to various political offices.
4. Being politically appointed to various government roles.
5. Being adept at using FaceTwit and similar applications.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @05:32PM
AND play soccer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheLink on Monday February 27 2017, @07:06PM (3 children)
I'm no neuroscientist or biologist but my hypothesis is that when brains first evolved they weren't really for solving the problem of thinking. Many single celled creatures already did similar levels of thinking compared to multicellular creatures of that era. What brains solved was the problem of controlling a multicellular creature. You can't just have a single neuron hooked up to everything and controlling it. No redundancy- if that neuron died the whole organism would be wasted.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @07:20PM
Its brain-size relative to body size that predicts intelligence.
My theory is that every gram of body-weight needs X number of neurons to maintain. So once a species exceeds that ratio its got neurons for other stuff like problem solving.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday February 27 2017, @08:06PM (1 child)
Crows and Parrots may seem smart, as you suggest. But can they tweet?
Can they re-tweet?
Can they click Like? Follow? Subscribe? Thumbs Up?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @08:45PM
Crows and Parrots may seem smart, as you suggest. But can they tweet?
Well, you are talking about birds...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday February 27 2017, @04:59PM (1 child)
Around the turn of the century or right before there was a huge fad of Emergent Behavior with the obviously attractive aspect of no need to understand the math and no neural net cooties (those had fallen out of favor so had to be avoided, and they can take some hefty math too)
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Emergent%20Behavior [google.com]
This sounds very MIT Media Lab from 1999-ish where you'd program a couple simple rules into stick figure robots or flying drones or something and then the flock would appear to be IQ > 100 but it was mostly just lazy researchers doing visually cool stuff. From memory they were really into "sim ant" level stuff.
I suppose going in cold you could incorrectly assume that a flock of birds requires enormous coordination between all participants such that they all solve a giant CFD simulation the same way simultaneously and use ESP and stuff to coordinate turns. It turns out the algo is a little simpler like find your closest neighbor and stay an ideal distance X away from them plus add smaller correction vectors for food and predators and away you go with an operating bird flock, no CFD or ESP or full-mesh networking required.
This sounds like classic turn of the century emergent behavior probably evolution selected for, because its some abstraction of harassing a large bug looking for honey. Or maybe a really small mouse, really small.
The amazing shortcut smells total bee like, in the wild they won't ignore a closer flower on a more direct flight path just to copy the other bee. Bees are fairly lazy that way. It would be amazing if they carried little GPS units or traded honey to fireants for intel and ground guards or something like that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 27 2017, @09:14PM
The CFD was actually done by natural selection - the flockers that got it right survived to reproduce more and so they got the CFD answers by trial and error.
I wonder why emergent behavior was such a "new thing" when Conway's game of life had been around so long...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @06:11PM (1 child)
It's not AI, but BI.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @06:20PM
I C