

Bees Solve Complex Problems Faster Than Supercomputers - emmanuelory
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/10/bees-solve-complex-problems-faster-than-supercomputers.html

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jerf
Can we _please_ stop with these articles, that with due consideration I will
refer to as "fucking pieces of shit"? My HP48-G could probably brute-force the
instance size of the problems that they threw at these bees in less time than
the bees took, and there is also no particular reason to believe that the bees
actually _solve_ the problem, which is to say, 100% of the time find the
_perfectly optimal_ solution. Anything less is not a _solution_.

There is a long history of people simply assuming that things could _solve_ an
NP-hard problem when in fact you only get an approximation:
<http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf>

Bees may not be dumb, but they work at the speed of living things. In one flap
of the wings of one of the bees I bet a naive brute-force algorithm could have
solved the entire instance these researchers threw at the bees with time to
spare. TSP is exponential to truly solve, but I guarantee the researchers
didn't throw a very big instance at the bees, because if they had I guarantee
at some point the bees would have chosen a non-optimal path.

This isn't even abstractly cool; it's anti-knowledge of a kind with quantum
mysticism, if not quite as toxic. Reading these types of reports and taking
them at face value leaves you with a _less_ accurate understanding of the
world.

~~~
HelloBeautiful
Bees have evolved for 100M years. During this time an enormous amount of bees
have lived and finding a shorter path between flowers is obviously a very
strong evolutionary pressure.

Generally the bee species is a genetic algorithms supercomputer that have
worked for a very long time to find good solutions to the traveling salesman
problem. I'd guess your suggestion, that we should not even try to find the
results of that 100M years computation, is based on some personal feelings ;-)

~~~
bluekeybox
Bees no doubt have a very good biological implementation of some _heuristic
algorithm_ to the traveling salesman problem. It is extremely unlikely (as in
aliens in area 51 unlikely -- wishful thinking unlikely) that they have a
biological implementation of an _exact algorithm_. The Daily Galaxy article
makes it seem as if the bees are solving the problem using an exact algorithm,
and, moreover, that they are faster at doing so than a modern supercomputer,
which is all complete wishful-thinking nonsense.

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zb
This article is incorrect on two counts:

First of all, the travelling salesman problem is not actually about travelling
salesmen; a solution has to work on an arbitrary graph, not just one that is
constrained to the actual geometry of space.

Secondly, the bees' solution to the problem is heuristic; there is no
guarantee they will always find the optimal solution, though they'll almost
always be very close. Computers can apply heuristics too (with the same
caveat), and when they do so it's much faster than verifying an algorithmic
solution.

~~~
VMG
I hope this meme won't enter the public mind like "science can't explain how
bees can fly"

~~~
zb
Yeah, the bumble-bee thing is unfortunate. But there is something to this: we
can trade away a verifiably optimal solution for something more useful, like a
timely one. (Coincidentally, I submitted an article on that general theme this
very morning: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2371977>) If _that_ concept
entered the public mind it would be a great thing.

Unfortunately the article never touched on that, and all we get is "bees >
supercomputers!!!".

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qntm
I like how the bees are said to figure out the answer faster than a
supercomputer, when the problem involves "several" flowers. Unless "several"
is 15+ flowers, a supercomputer is going to have an optimal solution within
milliseconds, before the first bee has even reached the first flower. Now, if
the bees had 1000 flowers to visit, I would be more interested.

~~~
rimantas
I've seen this BS reporting before. The original paper, I believe is this:
<http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/657042>

Money quote:

    
    
      We analyzed bee flight movements in an array of four
      artificial flowers maximizing interfloral distances.
    

_Four_ flovers…

~~~
jeza
Wow, how many different paths is that? Somewhere around 256 at a guess? So a
computer could work out the optimal solution in microseconds purely by testing
all possible combinations. Though I'm guessing the bees don't just sit there
at the start working through all possible routes they're going to take that
day, it's surely something that they work out as they go along. Maybe that's
where they gain some efficiency advantage.

Though four flowers is hardly likely to be a real world scenario for bees.
Surely bees would encounter tens of thousands or more flowers in a field, so
it is there performance here that ultimately counts. Though perhaps four
flowers is better for determining how they make their actual decisions?

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merraksh
The article seems to mention a heuristic method the bumblebees use to improve
their path, which consists of changing subpaths. A heuristic doesn't
necessarily give the optimal solution, while there are methods that do give
the optimum. An example is Concorde at GAtech, that solved problems with 15k
nodes: <http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/concorde.html>

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pedrokost
"Bees need lots of energy to fly, so they seek the most efficient route among
networks of hundreds of flowers using angles of sunlight, which helps them
find their way home, researchers say."

How much energy do bees really need to fly? Is there any data available on the
subject?

~~~
ramchip
Why was the reply killed? It's very relevant.

\-----

1 point by jws 1 hour ago | link [dead]

The energy consumption of a fully laden Apis mellifera is in the neighborhood
of 55mW.

[http://www.culturaapicola.com.ar/apuntes/anatomia/130_efecto...](http://www.culturaapicola.com.ar/apuntes/anatomia/130_efecto_polen_nectar_curva_metabolica.pdf)

I had no idea it was so high.

\-----

~~~
wladimir
I don't understand either. I see this more frequently lately, that
(informative, on topic) posts are randomly killed. It's not like the poster
was a negative-karma user, either. Who decides which posts get killed?

~~~
bbatsell
Often it's because a user accidentally double-posts, the second post gets
auto-killed, the user can't see their own dead posts, and they delete the live
one rather than the dead one (because they can't tell which is which).

~~~
jws
bbatsell hit this correctly. I saw two replies appear and immediately killed
one. It surprises me to see replies on the dead one, there were no replies
when I did the kill.

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bane
I think a lot of this "bees are computers" business started back with this

[http://www.math.rochester.edu/about/newsletters/spring98/bee...](http://www.math.rochester.edu/about/newsletters/spring98/bees.html)

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Newky
After given the "travelling salesman" optimization assignment, on the handup,
I handed up my KD-tree implementation and at the end of the write up I
suggested the lecturer check out a similar article on bees to this (may have
been the same one, was a while ago)

got extra 2% bonus :)

