

Ants and the nature of their intelligence - comatose_kid
http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/93/931115Arc3062.html

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Alex3917
I think it was E.O. Wilson who once said, "If you're not interested in ants
then you're probably not a very interesting person."

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mhartl
_A single neuron in the human brain can respond only to what the neurons
connected to it are doing, but all of them together can be Immanuel Kant._

That's a lamentable example, though oddly appropriate given the recent "more
philosophy majors" story. As the Harvard Lampoon's _A Harvard Education in a
Book_ wryly observed, "Immanuel Kant is most famous for his great contribution
to the study of ethics, which is: 'What if _everyone_ did that?'" A better
summary of the Categorical Imperative, I've never seen.

I'll take the ants any day. At least they wouldn't turn me in if an axe
murderer showed up looking for me.

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dill_day
Hofstadter hit on this almost 30 years ago I think... I thought his dialogs
with the ant eater were really entertaining and thought provoking as well.

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LPTS
This is the kind of idea that will lead to revolutionary thinking across
multiple domains at some point. People in all sorts of fields should follow
this kind of work very closely. Excellent, exciting stuff.

This also offers a very fertile, multidisciplinary endeavor for developers,
designers, and science folks. A good designer should build an ant environment
such that the environment is strictly controlled, and precise alterations to
the environment can be made, and either video + software or tagging to track
the ants movements, environment, and functionality. A good computer scientist,
with a physics, mathematical, or cryptographic bent, could work with this
designer and ant researcher to use the ant environment video to generate
algorithms to model and predict ant behavior, which could be evolved as the
system generates more information about the ants. They could create several of
these identical boxes to run at once. Eventually, the system will be quite
good at predicting the behavior of ants. At this point, they could bring
aboard a person with an interest in ant brains, to link the models evolved
from the boxes with ant neurology. Then, they will have an answer to how
intelligent behavior can arise from stupid ants, which will offer
revolutionary insight into fields from AI to economics to psychology to
neurology to education.

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logjam
Knuth just said something about this at his last "Musings" lecture....
[http://thermalnoise.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/notes-from-
vale...](http://thermalnoise.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/notes-from-valentines-
day/)

