
Training bees to perform simple addition and subtraction - danso
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-to-teach-a-honeybee-to-do-math
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Terr_
For your amusement, a quote regarding fictional-computing from _Hogfather_
(1998) by Terry Pratchett:

> "That is the long-term storage, Archchancellor."

> "And how does that work?"

> "Er ... well, if you think of memory as a series of little shelves or, or,
> or holes, Archchancellor, in which you can put things, well, we found a way
> of making a sort of memory which, er, interfaces neatly with the ants, in
> fact, but more importantly can expand its size depending on how much we give
> it to remember and, er, is possibly a bit slow but----"

> "It's a very loud buzzing," said the Dean. "Is it going wrong?"

> "No, that shows it's working," said Ponder. "It's, er, beehives."

> He coughed.

> "Different types of pollen, different thicknesses of honey, placement of the
> eggs ... It's actually amazing how much information you can store on one
> honeycomb."

> He looked at their faces. "And it's very secure because anyone trying to
> tamper with it will get stung to death and Adrian believes that when we shut
> it down in the summer holidays we should get a nice lot of honey, too." He
> coughed again. "For our ... sand ... wiches," he said.

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grenoire
Having gotten particularly bored by pattern fitting algorithms, researches
have now diverted their attention back to organic NNs.

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fromthestart
Maybe I missed it, but did the article completely neglect to actually describe
what kind of arithmetic the bees were doing beyond a basic mention of addition
and subtraction? How large were the numbers? What was the success rate? Am I
expecting too much from PBS?

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dekhn
Actual paper link:
[http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/2/eaav0961](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/2/eaav0961)

they can only increment or decrement a number by 1 ("honeybees were able to
use color as a symbolic representation of the addition and subtraction signs
and learned, during 100 appetitive-aversive trials, to thus add or subtract
one element from different samples. ")

The paper is fairly readable even outside the area of expertise. It's
straightforward behavioral work.

Amusingly they used sugar as the positive reward and quinine as the negative
reward. I quite like the taste of quinine...

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cwkoss
Seems plausible that the bees were able to associate the colors with "many" or
"few" rather than (N+/-1). Seems like if they were able to make that general
association they would do better than chance, but still fail often.

Which could explain why the effect is fairly weak.

Would be interesting to see if the bees success rate at addition was
proportional to the starting value (ex. 1+1 has higher failure rate that 3+1)

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dachshound665
So they didn't try them on random setup to determine whether bees are just
good at "guessing" (i.e. sniffing out the right way)?

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downrightmike
Now we just need to teach them rocket science so they can get off of this
planet.

~~~
dang
Can you please not post unsubstantive comments here?

