
Honeybees Seem to Understand the Notion of Zero - johnny313
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/07/617863467/math-bee-honeybees-seem-to-understand-the-notion-of-zero
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adonovan
Some images here hint at the methodology:
[https://phys.org/news/2018-06-scientists-bees-
concept.html](https://phys.org/news/2018-06-scientists-bees-concept.html) The
number of ink marks (a discrete quantity) was varied independent of the mass
of ink; the bees aren't just gravitating to the least inky paper.

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sho_hn
I'm curious to see if they tried to keep the ink surface area of each number
the same. If not, maybe the bee's optics just average the card and go for the
one that's least filled in? Or at any rate, some way to rank visual complexity
rather than ruminate empty sets.

~~~
tkahnoski
Yeah... I don't see anyway for the study that 'more white' (or whatever the
card color was) wasn't what the bees learned. Particularly since this is the
actual correlation. "Howard trained one group of bees to understand that sugar
water would always be located under the card with the least number of
symbols."

EDIT: adonovan linked to an article with images and showing it's not as simple
as I imagined.

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pmontra
About submissions of NPR's posts: NPR prompts to accept tracking cookies and
the like or go to the plain text version. Unfortunately in the latter case it
redirects to the index of the site, that never has a link to the submitted
post and there is no search box.

Would fellow Hacker News submitters mind to post links to the text only
untracked versions? Thanks.

~~~
mottosso
[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=617863467](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=617863467)

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ddtaylor
When a cat had a litter of babies on our farm we took her in since it was a
cold winter and otherwise they probably wouldn't have made it. She had six
kittens and we left her alone with them since new mommy cats don't like to be
bothered much during early nursing.

Fast forward a bit right after the little ones started crawling around more
and she was getting up to move around, letting them out of her sight etc. One
of the kittens crawled into a basket and we picked it up and walked into
another room to see if she would notice the missing kitten. She came back and
checked around and determined she only had 5 babies and was missing one. We
felt terrible and quickly returned the kitten but it was clear she could count
or something very similar to counting.

~~~
swebs
Or she just recognized each one and came to a conclusion like "John is
missing"

~~~
bloak
Yes, it seems very plausible that a cat might recognise individual kittens.

I think there are also documented cases of birds noticing if one of their
newly hatched young is missing. In this case, because they're newly hatched,
one might guess that the parent is not recognising each one. An experiment is
called for: swap the young of two parents and see if both parents are happy
with the right number. I suspect someone has already tried this, but I can't
immediately find any reports.

~~~
Pulcinella
Yeah I imagine it’s much easier for animals to recognize individuals of their
own species than individuals of another. e.g. Humans have specialized brain
circuitry for recognizing human faces, but all horse or bird faces basically
look the same to us. A bird might easily think all humans look basically the
same but obviously each bird is totally different.

~~~
Sharlin
With cats, like with dogs, recognizing conspecifics is most likely highly
dependent on scent, a sensory modality whose richness in those and many other
species we humans can hardly imagine.

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kyleperik
This is claiming more than I think is really true. They're just training the
bees to avoid circles. The more circles, the less sugar water.

They're talking about zero like some highly advanced concept, probably because
it took humans a while to grasp. But like others are saying, they're was
always the concept of Nothing or None, and this is only how we interpreted it.
Of course many animals can "comprehend" zero, but tell them to represent it
and that gets a little different. Might take a while before they group the
terms that they think of as 2 or None

~~~
baddox
Yeah, I'm pretty sure humans never really struggled with the idea of Nothing
or None. From what I can tell, the "discovery of zero" refers to treating it
philosophically as a number, developing a specific symbol for it, and using
that symbol in positional number systems, which are all things that bees
likely do not do.

~~~
mchahn
> using that symbol in positional number systems

Exactly. There is a book about the number zero which is a good read (as are
the ones about pi, e, i, etc.).

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nonbel
> _" If bees can perceive zero with a brain of less than a million neurons, it
> suggests there are simple efficient ways to teach AI new tricks."_

Why are they just speculating about this? Do they think it would be hard to
train an image classifier to say "left" or "right" depending on whether that
half of the image had more geometric objects in it, then show it one vs none
objects to test it?

I don't think this would be at all difficult to do, the training data could
even be procedurally generated.

EDIT:

It looks like the test accuracy was only ~60% but from the supplements it took
them only 30-50 training examples over the course of 2-4 hrs to reach the
criteria of 80% correct:

> _When presented with the unfamiliar numbers of one versus zero, bees chose
> the lower number of zero (63.0 ± 2.9%; z score = 4.23, P < 0.001; Fig. 1D),
> showing an understanding that an empty set is lower than one,which is
> challenging for some other animals (5, 6, 18)._
> [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1124](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1124)

[1]
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2018/06/06/360.6...](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2018/06/06/360.6393.1124.DC1)

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karmakaze
This is very interesting reading and I don't want to discount what was
discovered. I would however like to see what other possible explanations are
possible and come up with tests to determine one or the other.

It is good to think in terms of why bees have this ability. Identifying
patterns in flora is beneficial, how do these differences arise? It could be
that certain patterns appear with others in correlated or inversely correlated
couplings. As far as the bees are concerned the amount of sugar is correlated
with a card shape of paper which hasn't expressed circles or triangles.
Perhaps that same blank card if left for a while will have some symbols and
less sugar. The 'concept', if we can even call it that, is that the presence
of symbols reduces the sugar concentration. I would definitely say they grok
an inverse relationship and that a blank card has a 'small quantity' of
symbols. I can't think of an experiment to tell if the bees consider a blank
card to be a small quantity or zero.

A good thought experiment is if we trained an AI similarly with these same
cards. If when presented with a blank card as yet unseen and a card with one
or six symbols, it chose the blank one, I don't think many would be arguing
(yet) that the AI understands zero, rather that it's pattern matching wiring
just classified it one way or the other.

Even AlphaGo when playing Lee Sedol apparently had gaps in its play and the
team was uncertain if they would be uncovered or not. Many, not all of these
were discovered and 'trained out' earlier working with Fan Hui who developed a
sense of where such weaknesses remained in some way to the way Kasparov could
sus out Deep Blue's 'thought patterns'. I wish there were more details on this
and how much less susceptable AlphaZero is to it.

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ams6110
It's pretty amazing to me that insect brains, as big as a few grains of sand,
still outperform the best we can do in autonomous driving and navigation. They
can fly around without hitting each other or other objects, they can leave
their nest and find their way back, etc.

~~~
jstanley
> They can fly around without hitting each other or other objects

They actually can't. They just harmlessly bounce off things when they hit them
due to their small size and low speed.

~~~
rbranson
Also our creations lack a self-healing exoskeleton.

~~~
nannal
I'm going to need about 4 years a quite a bit of VC money and will I have the
autonomous driving solution for you!

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jwilk
Text-only version:
[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=617863467](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=617863467)

~~~
pmontra
Thanks. Did you have to accept cookies to find this link?

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jwilk
I didn't agree to cookies, but to be frank, I don't know how I was supposed to
_find_ the link. The "Decline" button sent me to
[https://text.npr.org/](https://text.npr.org/), which doesn't seem to link to
the article in question. So I took a random aritcle and substituted the number
in the URL for the one in the HN's URL. That worked. :-)

~~~
manwithaplan
Next step: automation.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17263446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17263446)

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wry_discontent
Are there similar experiments where animals exhibit the behavior they
expected? Specifically "that the bees would see a blank paper as something
irrelevant that was completely different than what they had been trained on."

It would make this research much more interesting, because it sounds like zero
is just a concept that is included with mathematical abilities, albeit with a
little more conceptual difficulty.

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resource0x
There are many experiments demonstrating computational abilities of insects.
As another example, see very detailed article

Argentine ants solve the Towers of Hanoi
[http://jeb.biologists.org/content/214/1/50](http://jeb.biologists.org/content/214/1/50)

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derefr
“Zero” is a very different concept from “none.”

Human civilization had a word for “nothing” / “none” / “not any” for as long
as we’ve had language. “None” is something chimps can understand easily. Etc.

But _zero_ —that is a _counting number_. Numbers themselves are a very
abstract technique that required specific situations (shepherds counting
sheep, etc.) to invent. And zero came much later still.

Which is to say: sum types are easy. Types with null values are hard ;)

I would bet that these bees aren’t so much reading this data as “zero”, but
rather “presence/absence”, where absence is okay and presence is bad. (It’s
not like they first had to do a task that trained them to find the card with a
three, after all.)

~~~
jerf
"Which is to say: sum types are easy. Types with null values are hard ;)"

I'd like to present you with the 2018 Hacker News Award for Smoothest Surprise
Segue Into A Flamewar Topic.

I know, I know, it's a bit early, but I don't think anyone is going to top
this.

~~~
ramshorns
What's the flamewar topic?

~~~
jerf
Type systems. Granted, it may not be US politics, but it can produce heated
conversations short on light.

~~~
goatlover
And which programming languages do it right/wrong and how we'd all be better
off if we switched.

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frogpelt
Perhaps the bees figured out that the card with the most white space was the
card with sugar water?

A card with fewer symbols presumably has more white space. A card with no
symbols has more than a card with one symbol.

Or maybe they smelled it?

I'm not convinced.

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ggm
Maybe i don't get it, but this feels like not zero. It requires more things to
be present so they could pick less as a concept, not specifically none as a
concept

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dawhizkid
How did they hide the smell?

