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I agree, it makes the reader think the bee has some kind of foresight in the building process, like "hmm. here's my options, and I greatly prefer to build hexag
by degenerate 9y ago
I agree, it makes the reader think the bee has some kind of foresight in the building process, like "hmm. here's my options, and I greatly prefer to build hexagons!"
It's not really their choice to prefer it. It's what works best and thus bees are programmed to do. Imagine an alien reading the headline "Why humans prefer sleeping prone"
- labster 9y agoI think I saw that article on a Minbari news site, right next to "The 11 Most Meditative Vacation Spots in the Earth Alliance".
- vacri 9y agoHexagons are what you get when you squish a lot of semi-rigid round things together. It's not like the bees are designing hexagons - look at the cells on the free edges of a comb and you'll see little in the way of sharp hex-ey corners
- chii 9y agoit's hard to say what "designing" means - is a box-packing algorithm "designing" the packing pattern when it runs? Or is it just following a series of algorithmic steps "blindly" and yet, being able to reach an outcome that has certain properties (like being very densely packed)?