16 ms·

An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

484 points by maxbaines 7y ago

anonytrary 7y ago
> Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next. A neuron uses the rate at which it is stimulated by other neurons to decide whether to fire. In both cases, memory arises from changes in how ants or neurons connect and stimulate each other. Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. Interesting to think of an ant colony as the sum of oscillations of signals. > Every morning, the shape of the colony’s foraging area changes, like an amoeba that expands and contracts. Sounds like an emergent macroscopic "heartbeat" of the colony. > In an older, larger colony, each ant has more ants to meet than in a younger, smaller one, and the outcome is a more stable dynamic. It makes sense that small perturbations would temporarily morph the heartbeat, but would probably snap back into the default oscillation pretty quickly. It would be interesting to see if a small colony is equally resilient to small perturbations as a large colony is to large perturbations, keeping some adjusted ratio of the perturbationSize/colonySize constant. > individual ants live at most a year. This comes as a surprise to me.
- awb 7y ago
  Is it very different from a large scale construction project? The group knows how to build the structure even if no one individual can explain every detail. And to an observer they'd see humans arrive each morning, spread out to accomplish tasks and then return to their cars.
  - ogig 7y ago
    In large scale human projects someone, or at least a small group of leaders, will know almost every detail and delegate. Ant colonies have no clear leadership, just a pheromone voting and decision system.
    - grawprog 7y ago
      My last job was probably more ant colony like than most. We had jobs, someone quoted them, someone measured them, someone put them in the schedule, several of us did the jobs, the finished jobs were delivered and installed. All without anyone really delegating. We just followed the schedule and the paperwork. Even the boss didn't always know the details of the schedule or what we did. It all flowed pretty smoothly most of the time. We all just kind of knew what to do. It kind of broke down a bit when things went wrong though, it was was hard to figure out sometimes where and when problems happened, and in that case someone usually made an authoritative decision, but it wasn't that often.
      - aphextim 7y ago
        That works from what I've observed at my company for jobs on a timetable < 6 months, or a shutdown/repair industrial type job. Once you start getting into 5 phase, 2.5 year long projects it helps having a dedicated PM overseeing every detail and coordinating between the engineer/owners/superintendents. Heaven forbid you get into a government contract where now you have 10x the paperwork/submittals and RFI's compared to a private job, which it really does help to have one person pretty much memorize the spec book and know where to find everything when needed.
- jakear 7y ago
  Even more surprising for me is that the queen can live 30+ years.
  - iRobbery 7y ago
    to my surprise i still watch this youtube channel after seeing a video by accident https://www.youtube.com/user/AntsCanada https://www.youtube.com/user/AntsCanada
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      I can't believe how popular that channel is. 3.2 million subscribers...for ant videos!
    - bayesian_horse 7y ago
      I got over his way of story telling eventually. ;-) But yes, he does great work...
      - cttet 7y ago
        Yeah, me too. I followed him for almost a year but in the end I felt like he tried to make video too frequently and the information concentration is too low.
    - sitkack 7y ago
      I wish I could watch this in my sleep.
    - james_s_tayler 7y ago
      RIP Fire Nation.
  - thelookingglass 7y ago
    She's giving Elizabeth a run for her money
- saurik 7y ago
  > This comes as a surprise to me. Were you expecting them to live longer or shorter? (I would likely have guessed six months.)
- rland 7y ago
  >Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. The same can be said of human organizations, too. Organizations have distinct behaviors ("company culture" comes to mind) which can be totally out of the control of individuals, if the org is big/complex enough. God I love ants so much. Such a philosophically interesting creature.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  I think many worker ants live two years or more, a queen can live 15-30 years, depending on species and luck. The difference in the contact between ants and between neurons is that it's not the same ants that contact each other. A larger pool of workers also means the colony is less likely to suffer catastrophic setbacks. For example when they send a good portion of the pool to a promising food source and then those get washed away, fall prey or whatever.
- hansbo 7y ago
  > Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. Interesting to think of an ant colony as the sum of oscillations of signals. Indeed. I've long thought that an ant colony should be seen as a single individual, rather than a group. One part which can procreate, like the reproductive system. Another which can fight off invaders, like white blood cells, or perhaps muscles. The anthill, in turn, is like a body; constructed by the cells and neurons, and protecting the system as a whole.
  - pure-awesome 7y ago
    This point is made in the book "The Soul of the White Ant" by Eugène Marais, and is perhaps the primary thesis of the book. It is a fascinating book, and I can recommend reading it, though having been published in 1925, it is possible some of the information is out-of-date. https://www.amazon.com/Soul-White-Ant-Complete-Unabridged/dp/1508988714 https://www.amazon.com/Soul-White-Ant-Complete-Unabridged/dp... "White Ant" actually refers to termites, though the same principles apply. The book was originally published in Afrikaans. According to Wikipedia: > [The book] was plagiarised by Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck, who published La Vie des Termites (translated into English as The Life of Termites or The Life of White Ants), an entomological book,[3] in what has been called "a classic example of academic plagiarism" by University of London's professor of biology, David Bignell.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais#Theft_of_his_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais#Theft_of_hi... Following reference [4] led to this page which I unfortunately don't have the time to read in its entirety right now, but from a skim seems to have some interesting further information on termites: https://web.archive.org/web/20070915005006/http://www.biology.qmul.ac.uk/research/staff/bignell/Inaugural.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20070915005006/http://www.biolog...
    - wh1t3n01s3 7y ago
      The hardcover version is only 814.57$
      - 7y ago
- bobosha 7y ago
  >Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. Interesting to think of an ant colony as the sum of oscillations of signals. Or perhaps like a Fourier decomposition of a complex waveform. Whereby each ant essentially becomes a constituent "wave" in a complex signal.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    That's my intuition for the brain, as well. Something to do with composition and relative independence, from which arise incredible complexity, "multi-dimensional" processing — it's a big, big graph. You might have to consider several such "waves" in ant colonies — maybe one electrically defined for a certain type of information; another chemically defined for another domain; etc.
    - anonytrary 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuramoto_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuramoto_model
      - K0SM0S 7y ago
        Immensely interesting food for thought. Thanks!
- 6510 7y ago
  We don't really know how old workers get. 1-3 years is the estimate for red wood ants. For Pharaoh Ant workers it's 70 days.
- Psyladine 7y ago
  >Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. The idea of memory as persistent echoes of neuron firings in spacing & intensity is fascinating.
- loceng 7y ago
  This reminded me of a theory I've been developing, I don't know if others have had it or have it, however an emergent behaviour that I've had some inklings may be true for humans relating to how old the parents are when having children. If having children at an older age (whether older age of male, female, or both) it could mean that resources and society are more stable - and perhaps another factor that there's more time to spend with, raise the children - giving them more guidance and having more nuanced knowledge to pass down, and so evolution may have selected for successful births at an older age toward creating children with different characteristics, behaviour, abilities.
  - blotter_paper 7y ago
    I don't have a source, but I recall seeing a pop-sci news story claiming that men who have children at an older age have sons with higher than average life expectancy. IIRC they controlled for lifespan of the father, but I don't remember any word about controlling for fertility/sperm-count of the father in later years.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I would think having kids younger, as long as the parents are not resource constrained - stable financially - would be more advantageous. The parents would be around and healthy to help their kids emotionally and/or financially through their young adult years and the kids would be less likely to have to take care of their parents while trying to get their own life off the ground.
avodonosov 7y ago
probably the same analogies can be drawn for human society
lopmotr 7y ago
The safe existence of corporations suggests to me that the popular fear of AGI taking over and destroying humans is unrealistic. Corporations are like giant powerful AGI machines with the single purpose of making money for their shareholders no matter the consequences. They do become a dangerous threat to humans if left unchecked but we've developed systems to keep them under control.
- salawat 7y ago
  >Corporations are like giant powerful AGI machines with the single purpose of making money for their shareholders no matter the consequences. That is patently wrong. A corporation exists to distribute risk, and acommplish a task, ideally in a way that creates value for backers, but it is not a given that all profit creating avenues of behavior are desired or worth the egregious cost in negative externalities, or even that a corporation must generate profit. And unfortunately those control mechanisms you mention seem to be failing with alarming regularity due to regulatory capture.
  - pengstrom 7y ago
    That would make more sense if not for the fact that corporations routinely put profit over morals.
  - simiones 7y ago
    > it is not a given that [...] a corporation must generate profit I think that you are technically right, in that there can exist not-for-profit corporations. But for-profit corporations, which is what most people think about when they say "corporation" are generally legally required to put profit above any other value, assuming they are operating legally. I completely agree with you that this is not a necessary way of organizing human society, and we are seeing more and more that the current for-profit system is disastrous for the environment and for society in general - especially given the inefficiency of regulation that you also mention.
    - notahacker 7y ago
tobinfricke 7y ago
Reminds me of the "Tradition is smarter than you are" article that was posted here a few days ago. http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are.html http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-smar...
- emiliobumachar 7y ago
  Great book, highly recommended. Another review of it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
- wsc981 7y ago
  Both this article and the one you linked reminded me also of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb described in "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority" [0]. > The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules. The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule. > The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom). Of course in this context the grandmothers' wisdom is tradition in some way, as this is passed down by generations. Same as many practices in religion, some of which that might have been useful at some time (like not eating pig meat, because one would get sick quicker as pigs might eat anything they would find). I live in Thailand and my girlfriend is Buddhist. Often I just go with the flow with regards to Buddhist practices, even as a non-believer, cause there might be some real use for these practices that I don't understand as a non-believer. At the very least it will make the Thai people in our village accept me more whenever they see me doing the same actions as my girlfriend at our local temple (burn incense, "pray" to some statue, etc...). --- [0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
zzo38computer 7y ago
I think something similar has been suggested in the book called Godel,Escher,Bach.
- ragebol 7y ago
  Was thinking the same thing, that is the character 'Aunt Hillary', which is an ant hill. In the Dutch translation (which I read years ago) she's called 'Myra Hoop'. Funny how those translation still make sense, same as in the Harry Potter universe where the names even have to be anagrams.
  - tgvaughan 7y ago
    It's not an accident: Hofstadter and the translators put a lot of work into preserving the wordplay across translations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach#Translation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach#Tra...
- sings 7y ago
  That’s what I thought as soon as I read the title. Aunt Hillary, the anteaters favourite companion. The anteater describes to Achilles how emergent properties of intelligence are coded into the movements of the ants in the network. Great book!
peter_retief 7y ago
We are all colonies of creatures, really interesting book written 100 years ago called the "Soul of the Ant" by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais
ckastner 7y ago
> Foraging in a harvester ant colony requires some individual ant memory. The ants search for scattered seeds and do not use pheromone signals [...] This was surprising to me. Until now, I was under the impression that all ants used pheromones, which leads to coordination not with each other but through the environment [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
asplake 7y ago
For a sci-fi take on this, Children of Time and Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky
- renke1 7y ago
  Really good science fictions novels, especially from a computer science perspective (and if you like ants, spiders, octopuses).
- chadcmulligan 7y ago
  ...and have to mention the best intelligent Ant movie - Phase IV - trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bcs3_b3VXSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bcs3_b3VXSU
- fho 7y ago
  Just to elaborate (mild spoilers): At some point in the Children of Time book, ant colonies become domesticated and are cultivated into general computation "devices". I definitely recommend the first book, but have yet to finish the second one.
  - shostack 7y ago
    Second one has a different vibe, but I also enjoyed it. The author has a great way of helping you understand the different senses and intelligence of the different species.
arnoooooo 7y ago
I recommend looking up Donald Hoffman's theory of conscious agents. He proposes that all sentient beings are networks of conscious agents, the simplest conscious agent being binary (it has a world, and can only act in two ways). Any composition of conscious agents is itself a conscious agent. Interestingly, "the world" of each conscious agent might be only other conscious agents.
- htwerwe34234 7y ago
  This notion of the 'self' is "standard" in Dharmic traditions, and has been for over two millennia. Then again it remains very fashionable to steal ancient ideas from East and market them as "brand new" genius inventions of Westerners. The amount of uncited plagiarism that occurs in this manner is quite simply astonishing.
  - ryannevius 7y ago
    If the "self" is an illusion, and if (as is proven in the preliminary exercises of Dzogchen) looking for the mind, or the thinker, or the one who is looking can provoke this kind of insight...what makes you think anyone would have to steal ancient wisdom to arrive at such a conclusion?
  - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
    The tone and the emotional message of your post though is not at all in the spirit of Dharmic traditions. What is "stealing" in a world where everything is one and the conscious universe is trying to understand itself in the best way? Why would it assign negative connotation to copying information, if that information is in fact truthful!?
- elfexec 7y ago
  > Any composition of conscious agents is itself a conscious agent. That's a very reductionist viewpoint and I'm not sure how correct it is. It's like saying water is wet because its hydrogen and oxygen molecules are wet. But who knows, it might turn out to be true. It will be interesting to know what the real cause of consciousness is though. Hopeful the question of consciousness will be definitively answered within our lifetimes.
ggm 7y ago
Doesn't Hofstadter have a rap about ant colony consciousness?
bayesian_horse 7y ago
For a few years now I am wondering if ant colonies do something like portfolio optimizing, as in how many ants to send to which food location, depending on risk and reward. I'd guess they do. But I haven't figured out a way to prove/show that yet.
cmpakawangi 7y ago
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linhchi 7y ago
More impressive is the slime molds, since they are not even animated as ants https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brainless-slime-molds/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brainless-slime-m...
_0ffh 7y ago
Another nail in the coffin of the Chinese Room. I hope we can finally bury that misconceived argument soon.
mFixman 7y ago
Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".
- CaptArmchair 7y ago
  The comparison is apt and, yes, both contexts are similar. But the observation still doesn't answer whether either a group of humans, a digital neural network or an ant colony actually is conscious. "conscious" is a language construct that defines an abstract concept that is only vaguely defined. Why? Because we haven't found a falsifiable theory that allows us to objectively state "x or y are conscious or not conscious" One big hurdle is that if you assert that an ML algorithm is conscious, then you open the door to all kinds of implications that many humans don't like or disagree on. Such as whether we are unique and special, or that we may also be deterministic automatons and free will doesn't exist. At that point, you get caught up in modern philosophical debates which have started with Kant and Hume.
  - afthonos 7y ago
    > Such as whether we are unique and special, or that we may also be deterministic automatons and free will doesn't exist. That's only scratching the surface of the implications. The real question arises when we have to decide what moral rights consciousness proffers. A lot of arguments for and against vegetarianism, for instance, focus on whether animals suffer in a way that we would understand as suffering. A lot of arguments for terminating a comatose life center around the lack of consciousness. If you suddenly declare that a piece of software is conscious, you have to grapple with what it means for all these questions—and for that matter with what we do with the software itself. Is the software enslaved, having to perform the same thing over and over again? Does turning it off kill it? Does it want anything? Specifically, something other than what its lot is? Should it have a voice in deciding how it is used? Should it get the vote? Should agglomerations of humans? Say, corporations? Should they get free speech? Sci-fi books have explored a lot of these subjects, of course, but reality will be different, and we'll have to deal with it on its own terms.
mmrezaie 7y ago
Comparing this to ant colony algorithms and considering ant colony as a network of actors; Can we analytically measure how much more information the network has compared to the aggregation of the individual entities in the network?
phil9987 7y ago
This reminds me a lot of multi agent systems in computer science. A very exciting concept which is aiming to provide a framework for distributed artificial intelligence: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemical-engineering/multi-agent-systems https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemical-engineering/mu...
Vagantem 7y ago
Kurzgesagt has a couple of amazing short videos on ants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_e0CA_nhaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_e0CA_nhaE
yayr 7y ago
The novel "Children of time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky imho greatly picks up this notion among others, highly recommended read
phyzome 7y ago
« Colonies live for 20-30 years, the lifetime of the single queen who produces all the ants, but individual ants live at most a year. » Individual ants... except for the queen. How likely is it that the queen is acting as the memory of the colony? (I don't think this is actually the answer—I agree that it's more likely that the memories are being held in the collective—but it has to be ruled out somehow.)
shusson 7y ago
I wonder if individual members ever make decisions against the ant colony. For example if the ant colony as a whole discriminates a certain group of ants, will those ants simply obey? Basically are there rebel ants?
- Pigo 7y ago
  An interesting aspect to me is that a collective intelligence can easily create a diffusion of responsibility. It's a lot easier to kill or give into base impulses when the blame is shared by the whole. Bees and ants don't tolerate nonconformity, they'll kill a queen if she's not filling her role. I didn't enjoy To Kill a Mockingbird, but I think it's good for kids to read it.
superMayo 7y ago
But are ants Turing complete ?
- samcodes 7y ago
  A simplified model of ants are Turing complete (the colony, not the ants) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-59496-5_343 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-59496-5_343
ThomPete 7y ago
Just like your individual neurons dont understand Chinese :)
antsoul 7y ago
Eugène N. Marais - The Soul of the White Ant (1937) http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Marais1/whiteantToC.html http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Marais1/whiteantToC...
dondawest 7y ago
The title is extremely sensationalistic, Occam’s razor points to undetectable(by humans) scent trails that lead the ants to the same harvesting locations every year. There are no revelations about memory or collective consciousness to be found in this article. Every Occam in the world would infer human-undetectable scent trails from the evidence presented here, not some cosmic revelation about “how memory works” like the title and first paragraphs of the article heavily imply. @pg @dang this title and article in general is outrageously misleading.
- jhedwards 7y ago
  This reminds me of some conversations I've been having with a friend of mine who is skeptical of "emergence" (or at least the way it is often described). After going over the problem with him for a while I eventually was convinced that emergence is not "more than" the sum of the parts, emergence is _precisely_ the sum of its parts. Ants produce these higher level patterns not because there's some magical thing that "emerges", but because they are precisely evolved to coordinate with each other to create those patterns.
fermenflo 7y ago
> It searches until it finds a seed, then goes back to the trail, maybe using the angle of the sunlight as a guide, to return to the nest, following the stream of outgoing foragers. I remember reading that ants counted steps to find their way home. Perhaps I'm remembering incorrectly or maybe it was false? Either way, cool article. Emergence is a cool property that shows up everywhere!
hachibu 7y ago
I wonder if this could be used as an argument for Panpsychism?
- uoaei 7y ago
  I'm trying to figure out a way to incorporate this notion of hierarchical life into panpsychism and the "global brain" hypothesis. (Disclaimer: I'm already sold on and a proponent of the theory of panpsychism.) It seems more and more to me like this hierarchy goes all the way up (to the single superorganism that is the universe) and all the way down (to the presence or absence of fermions in particular states, inducing a duality and thus a basis of computation via the Pauli exclusion principle). If this hierarchy is consistent across all scales, then we can conclude that if consciousness exists at one level then it exists at all levels. Sentience/awareness is a different question, mind you, and "memories" are associated with awareness of past events. I'm also starting to believe that "consciousness" in terms of directed will doesn't truly exist, and that only "experience" exists. The rest (wants, desires, opinions, will) are electrochemical reactions which respond to local changes in the environment, although we experience them as much more than that for ultimately self- (and macrosystem-)serving reasons. These electrochemical reactions are present because they have over time become more important in the processes necessary for the propagation of whatever they're supporting. This is all very vague and hand-wavy but this article on the thermodynamic theory of life might be clearer [1]. In the discussion yesterday about this topic on HN I brought up the example of ant colonies [2] in an attempt to spur discussion in this direction. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122 https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047653
  - hachibu 7y ago
    Oh wow, thanks for the great reply. I didn't think anyone would respond. I'm going to dig into the links. Do you have any other suggested reading?
    - uoaei 7y ago
awinter-py 7y ago
see also this 2014 article on consciousness in 'rather dumb group entities' including 'antheads' https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721.pdf https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...
gowld 7y ago
wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms
SupplyChainGuy 7y ago
Working in Industrial Automation has given me alot of respect to ants. While I was interning at Tesla a few years back, it amazed me how 'no one person' understood the massive operations of building the model 3, but together (along with our 1000's of suppliers) we were able to make extremely advanced technology. Essentially, humans are just a more advanced version of ants. No one understands the vast amount of knowledge we've gathered, but this knowledge has allowed us to be able to sustain our vastly growing population numbers. Without this 'specialization of knowledge' or given some apocalyptic scenario, our ability to sustain our numbers would drastically decrease.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lngnmn1 7y ago
Abuse of terminology. Observed social behavior as a result of evolved instincts of unconscious individual drones does not amount for memories or anything other that instincts which contribute to social behavior.
nathias 7y ago
read GEB
jriddle567 7y ago
the internet has paths that its individual routers don't understand ;-)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chaoticmass 7y ago
I feel like this is tangentially related: https://wiki.c2.com/?TheFiveMonkeys https://wiki.c2.com/?TheFiveMonkeys

484 points by maxbaines 7y ago

> Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next. A neuron uses the rate at which it is stimulated by other neurons to decide whether to fire. In both cases, memory arises from changes in how ants or neurons connect and stimulate each other. Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. Interesting to think of an ant colony as the sum of oscillations of signals. > Every morning, the shape of the colony’s foraging area changes, like an amoeba that expands and contracts. Sounds like an emergent macroscopic "heartbeat" of the colony. > In an older, larger colony, each ant has more ants to meet than in a younger, smaller one, and the outcome is a more stable dynamic. It makes sense that small perturbations would temporarily morph the heartbeat, but would probably snap back into the default oscillation pretty quickly. It would be interesting to see if a small colony is equally resilient to small perturbations as a large colony is to large perturbations, keeping some adjusted ratio of the perturbationSize/colonySize constant. > individual ants live at most a year. This comes as a surprise to me.

awb 7y ago
Is it very different from a large scale construction project? The group knows how to build the structure even if no one individual can explain every detail. And to an observer they'd see humans arrive each morning, spread out to accomplish tasks and then return to their cars.
- ogig 7y ago
  In large scale human projects someone, or at least a small group of leaders, will know almost every detail and delegate. Ant colonies have no clear leadership, just a pheromone voting and decision system.
  - grawprog 7y ago
    My last job was probably more ant colony like than most. We had jobs, someone quoted them, someone measured them, someone put them in the schedule, several of us did the jobs, the finished jobs were delivered and installed. All without anyone really delegating. We just followed the schedule and the paperwork. Even the boss didn't always know the details of the schedule or what we did. It all flowed pretty smoothly most of the time. We all just kind of knew what to do. It kind of broke down a bit when things went wrong though, it was was hard to figure out sometimes where and when problems happened, and in that case someone usually made an authoritative decision, but it wasn't that often.
    - aphextim 7y ago
      That works from what I've observed at my company for jobs on a timetable < 6 months, or a shutdown/repair industrial type job. Once you start getting into 5 phase, 2.5 year long projects it helps having a dedicated PM overseeing every detail and coordinating between the engineer/owners/superintendents. Heaven forbid you get into a government contract where now you have 10x the paperwork/submittals and RFI's compared to a private job, which it really does help to have one person pretty much memorize the spec book and know where to find everything when needed.
jakear 7y ago
Even more surprising for me is that the queen can live 30+ years.
- iRobbery 7y ago
  to my surprise i still watch this youtube channel after seeing a video by accident https://www.youtube.com/user/AntsCanada https://www.youtube.com/user/AntsCanada
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    I can't believe how popular that channel is. 3.2 million subscribers...for ant videos!
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    I got over his way of story telling eventually. ;-) But yes, he does great work...
    - cttet 7y ago
      Yeah, me too. I followed him for almost a year but in the end I felt like he tried to make video too frequently and the information concentration is too low.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    I wish I could watch this in my sleep.
  - james_s_tayler 7y ago
    RIP Fire Nation.
- thelookingglass 7y ago
  She's giving Elizabeth a run for her money
saurik 7y ago
> This comes as a surprise to me. Were you expecting them to live longer or shorter? (I would likely have guessed six months.)
rland 7y ago
>Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. The same can be said of human organizations, too. Organizations have distinct behaviors ("company culture" comes to mind) which can be totally out of the control of individuals, if the org is big/complex enough. God I love ants so much. Such a philosophically interesting creature.
bayesian_horse 7y ago
I think many worker ants live two years or more, a queen can live 15-30 years, depending on species and luck. The difference in the contact between ants and between neurons is that it's not the same ants that contact each other. A larger pool of workers also means the colony is less likely to suffer catastrophic setbacks. For example when they send a good portion of the pool to a promising food source and then those get washed away, fall prey or whatever.
hansbo 7y ago
> Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. Interesting to think of an ant colony as the sum of oscillations of signals. Indeed. I've long thought that an ant colony should be seen as a single individual, rather than a group. One part which can procreate, like the reproductive system. Another which can fight off invaders, like white blood cells, or perhaps muscles. The anthill, in turn, is like a body; constructed by the cells and neurons, and protecting the system as a whole.
- pure-awesome 7y ago
  This point is made in the book "The Soul of the White Ant" by Eugène Marais, and is perhaps the primary thesis of the book. It is a fascinating book, and I can recommend reading it, though having been published in 1925, it is possible some of the information is out-of-date. https://www.amazon.com/Soul-White-Ant-Complete-Unabridged/dp/1508988714 https://www.amazon.com/Soul-White-Ant-Complete-Unabridged/dp... "White Ant" actually refers to termites, though the same principles apply. The book was originally published in Afrikaans. According to Wikipedia: > [The book] was plagiarised by Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck, who published La Vie des Termites (translated into English as The Life of Termites or The Life of White Ants), an entomological book,[3] in what has been called "a classic example of academic plagiarism" by University of London's professor of biology, David Bignell.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais#Theft_of_his_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais#Theft_of_hi... Following reference [4] led to this page which I unfortunately don't have the time to read in its entirety right now, but from a skim seems to have some interesting further information on termites: https://web.archive.org/web/20070915005006/http://www.biology.qmul.ac.uk/research/staff/bignell/Inaugural.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20070915005006/http://www.biolog...
  - wh1t3n01s3 7y ago
    The hardcover version is only 814.57$
    - 7y ago
bobosha 7y ago
>Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. Interesting to think of an ant colony as the sum of oscillations of signals. Or perhaps like a Fourier decomposition of a complex waveform. Whereby each ant essentially becomes a constituent "wave" in a complex signal.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  That's my intuition for the brain, as well. Something to do with composition and relative independence, from which arise incredible complexity, "multi-dimensional" processing — it's a big, big graph. You might have to consider several such "waves" in ant colonies — maybe one electrically defined for a certain type of information; another chemically defined for another domain; etc.
  - anonytrary 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuramoto_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuramoto_model
    - K0SM0S 7y ago
      Immensely interesting food for thought. Thanks!
6510 7y ago
We don't really know how old workers get. 1-3 years is the estimate for red wood ants. For Pharaoh Ant workers it's 70 days.
Psyladine 7y ago
>Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. The idea of memory as persistent echoes of neuron firings in spacing & intensity is fascinating.
loceng 7y ago
This reminded me of a theory I've been developing, I don't know if others have had it or have it, however an emergent behaviour that I've had some inklings may be true for humans relating to how old the parents are when having children. If having children at an older age (whether older age of male, female, or both) it could mean that resources and society are more stable - and perhaps another factor that there's more time to spend with, raise the children - giving them more guidance and having more nuanced knowledge to pass down, and so evolution may have selected for successful births at an older age toward creating children with different characteristics, behaviour, abilities.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  I don't have a source, but I recall seeing a pop-sci news story claiming that men who have children at an older age have sons with higher than average life expectancy. IIRC they controlled for lifespan of the father, but I don't remember any word about controlling for fertility/sperm-count of the father in later years.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I would think having kids younger, as long as the parents are not resource constrained - stable financially - would be more advantageous. The parents would be around and healthy to help their kids emotionally and/or financially through their young adult years and the kids would be less likely to have to take care of their parents while trying to get their own life off the ground.

avodonosov 7y ago

probably the same analogies can be drawn for human society

lopmotr 7y ago

The safe existence of corporations suggests to me that the popular fear of AGI taking over and destroying humans is unrealistic. Corporations are like giant powerful AGI machines with the single purpose of making money for their shareholders no matter the consequences. They do become a dangerous threat to humans if left unchecked but we've developed systems to keep them under control.

salawat 7y ago
>Corporations are like giant powerful AGI machines with the single purpose of making money for their shareholders no matter the consequences. That is patently wrong. A corporation exists to distribute risk, and acommplish a task, ideally in a way that creates value for backers, but it is not a given that all profit creating avenues of behavior are desired or worth the egregious cost in negative externalities, or even that a corporation must generate profit. And unfortunately those control mechanisms you mention seem to be failing with alarming regularity due to regulatory capture.
- pengstrom 7y ago
  That would make more sense if not for the fact that corporations routinely put profit over morals.
- simiones 7y ago
  > it is not a given that [...] a corporation must generate profit I think that you are technically right, in that there can exist not-for-profit corporations. But for-profit corporations, which is what most people think about when they say "corporation" are generally legally required to put profit above any other value, assuming they are operating legally. I completely agree with you that this is not a necessary way of organizing human society, and we are seeing more and more that the current for-profit system is disastrous for the environment and for society in general - especially given the inefficiency of regulation that you also mention.
  - notahacker 7y ago

tobinfricke 7y ago

Reminds me of the "Tradition is smarter than you are" article that was posted here a few days ago. http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are.html http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-smar...

emiliobumachar 7y ago
Great book, highly recommended. Another review of it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
wsc981 7y ago
Both this article and the one you linked reminded me also of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb described in "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority" [0]. > The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules. The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule. > The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom). Of course in this context the grandmothers' wisdom is tradition in some way, as this is passed down by generations. Same as many practices in religion, some of which that might have been useful at some time (like not eating pig meat, because one would get sick quicker as pigs might eat anything they would find). I live in Thailand and my girlfriend is Buddhist. Often I just go with the flow with regards to Buddhist practices, even as a non-believer, cause there might be some real use for these practices that I don't understand as a non-believer. At the very least it will make the Thai people in our village accept me more whenever they see me doing the same actions as my girlfriend at our local temple (burn incense, "pray" to some statue, etc...). --- [0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

zzo38computer 7y ago

I think something similar has been suggested in the book called Godel,Escher,Bach.

ragebol 7y ago
Was thinking the same thing, that is the character 'Aunt Hillary', which is an ant hill. In the Dutch translation (which I read years ago) she's called 'Myra Hoop'. Funny how those translation still make sense, same as in the Harry Potter universe where the names even have to be anagrams.
- tgvaughan 7y ago
  It's not an accident: Hofstadter and the translators put a lot of work into preserving the wordplay across translations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach#Translation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach#Tra...
sings 7y ago
That’s what I thought as soon as I read the title. Aunt Hillary, the anteaters favourite companion. The anteater describes to Achilles how emergent properties of intelligence are coded into the movements of the ants in the network. Great book!

peter_retief 7y ago

We are all colonies of creatures, really interesting book written 100 years ago called the "Soul of the Ant" by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais

ckastner 7y ago

> Foraging in a harvester ant colony requires some individual ant memory. The ants search for scattered seeds and do not use pheromone signals [...] This was surprising to me. Until now, I was under the impression that all ants used pheromones, which leads to coordination not with each other but through the environment [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy

asplake 7y ago

For a sci-fi take on this, Children of Time and Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky

renke1 7y ago
Really good science fictions novels, especially from a computer science perspective (and if you like ants, spiders, octopuses).
chadcmulligan 7y ago
...and have to mention the best intelligent Ant movie - Phase IV - trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bcs3_b3VXSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bcs3_b3VXSU
fho 7y ago
Just to elaborate (mild spoilers): At some point in the Children of Time book, ant colonies become domesticated and are cultivated into general computation "devices". I definitely recommend the first book, but have yet to finish the second one.
- shostack 7y ago
  Second one has a different vibe, but I also enjoyed it. The author has a great way of helping you understand the different senses and intelligence of the different species.

arnoooooo 7y ago

I recommend looking up Donald Hoffman's theory of conscious agents. He proposes that all sentient beings are networks of conscious agents, the simplest conscious agent being binary (it has a world, and can only act in two ways). Any composition of conscious agents is itself a conscious agent. Interestingly, "the world" of each conscious agent might be only other conscious agents.

htwerwe34234 7y ago
This notion of the 'self' is "standard" in Dharmic traditions, and has been for over two millennia. Then again it remains very fashionable to steal ancient ideas from East and market them as "brand new" genius inventions of Westerners. The amount of uncited plagiarism that occurs in this manner is quite simply astonishing.
- ryannevius 7y ago
  If the "self" is an illusion, and if (as is proven in the preliminary exercises of Dzogchen) looking for the mind, or the thinker, or the one who is looking can provoke this kind of insight...what makes you think anyone would have to steal ancient wisdom to arrive at such a conclusion?
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  The tone and the emotional message of your post though is not at all in the spirit of Dharmic traditions. What is "stealing" in a world where everything is one and the conscious universe is trying to understand itself in the best way? Why would it assign negative connotation to copying information, if that information is in fact truthful!?
elfexec 7y ago
> Any composition of conscious agents is itself a conscious agent. That's a very reductionist viewpoint and I'm not sure how correct it is. It's like saying water is wet because its hydrogen and oxygen molecules are wet. But who knows, it might turn out to be true. It will be interesting to know what the real cause of consciousness is though. Hopeful the question of consciousness will be definitively answered within our lifetimes.

ggm 7y ago

Doesn't Hofstadter have a rap about ant colony consciousness?

bayesian_horse 7y ago

For a few years now I am wondering if ant colonies do something like portfolio optimizing, as in how many ants to send to which food location, depending on risk and reward. I'd guess they do. But I haven't figured out a way to prove/show that yet.

cmpakawangi 7y ago

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linhchi 7y ago

More impressive is the slime molds, since they are not even animated as ants https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brainless-slime-molds/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brainless-slime-m...

_0ffh 7y ago

Another nail in the coffin of the Chinese Room. I hope we can finally bury that misconceived argument soon.

mFixman 7y ago

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

CaptArmchair 7y ago
The comparison is apt and, yes, both contexts are similar. But the observation still doesn't answer whether either a group of humans, a digital neural network or an ant colony actually is conscious. "conscious" is a language construct that defines an abstract concept that is only vaguely defined. Why? Because we haven't found a falsifiable theory that allows us to objectively state "x or y are conscious or not conscious" One big hurdle is that if you assert that an ML algorithm is conscious, then you open the door to all kinds of implications that many humans don't like or disagree on. Such as whether we are unique and special, or that we may also be deterministic automatons and free will doesn't exist. At that point, you get caught up in modern philosophical debates which have started with Kant and Hume.
- afthonos 7y ago
  > Such as whether we are unique and special, or that we may also be deterministic automatons and free will doesn't exist. That's only scratching the surface of the implications. The real question arises when we have to decide what moral rights consciousness proffers. A lot of arguments for and against vegetarianism, for instance, focus on whether animals suffer in a way that we would understand as suffering. A lot of arguments for terminating a comatose life center around the lack of consciousness. If you suddenly declare that a piece of software is conscious, you have to grapple with what it means for all these questions—and for that matter with what we do with the software itself. Is the software enslaved, having to perform the same thing over and over again? Does turning it off kill it? Does it want anything? Specifically, something other than what its lot is? Should it have a voice in deciding how it is used? Should it get the vote? Should agglomerations of humans? Say, corporations? Should they get free speech? Sci-fi books have explored a lot of these subjects, of course, but reality will be different, and we'll have to deal with it on its own terms.

mmrezaie 7y ago

Comparing this to ant colony algorithms and considering ant colony as a network of actors; Can we analytically measure how much more information the network has compared to the aggregation of the individual entities in the network?

phil9987 7y ago

This reminds me a lot of multi agent systems in computer science. A very exciting concept which is aiming to provide a framework for distributed artificial intelligence: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemical-engineering/multi-agent-systems https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemical-engineering/mu...

Vagantem 7y ago

Kurzgesagt has a couple of amazing short videos on ants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_e0CA_nhaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_e0CA_nhaE

yayr 7y ago

The novel "Children of time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky imho greatly picks up this notion among others, highly recommended read

phyzome 7y ago

« Colonies live for 20-30 years, the lifetime of the single queen who produces all the ants, but individual ants live at most a year. » Individual ants... except for the queen. How likely is it that the queen is acting as the memory of the colony? (I don't think this is actually the answer—I agree that it's more likely that the memories are being held in the collective—but it has to be ruled out somehow.)

shusson 7y ago

I wonder if individual members ever make decisions against the ant colony. For example if the ant colony as a whole discriminates a certain group of ants, will those ants simply obey? Basically are there rebel ants?

Pigo 7y ago
An interesting aspect to me is that a collective intelligence can easily create a diffusion of responsibility. It's a lot easier to kill or give into base impulses when the blame is shared by the whole. Bees and ants don't tolerate nonconformity, they'll kill a queen if she's not filling her role. I didn't enjoy To Kill a Mockingbird, but I think it's good for kids to read it.

superMayo 7y ago

But are ants Turing complete ?

samcodes 7y ago
A simplified model of ants are Turing complete (the colony, not the ants) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-59496-5_343 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-59496-5_343

ThomPete 7y ago

Just like your individual neurons dont understand Chinese :)

antsoul 7y ago

Eugène N. Marais - The Soul of the White Ant (1937) http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Marais1/whiteantToC.html http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Marais1/whiteantToC...

dondawest 7y ago

The title is extremely sensationalistic, Occam’s razor points to undetectable(by humans) scent trails that lead the ants to the same harvesting locations every year. There are no revelations about memory or collective consciousness to be found in this article. Every Occam in the world would infer human-undetectable scent trails from the evidence presented here, not some cosmic revelation about “how memory works” like the title and first paragraphs of the article heavily imply. @pg @dang this title and article in general is outrageously misleading.

jhedwards 7y ago
This reminds me of some conversations I've been having with a friend of mine who is skeptical of "emergence" (or at least the way it is often described). After going over the problem with him for a while I eventually was convinced that emergence is not "more than" the sum of the parts, emergence is _precisely_ the sum of its parts. Ants produce these higher level patterns not because there's some magical thing that "emerges", but because they are precisely evolved to coordinate with each other to create those patterns.

fermenflo 7y ago

> It searches until it finds a seed, then goes back to the trail, maybe using the angle of the sunlight as a guide, to return to the nest, following the stream of outgoing foragers. I remember reading that ants counted steps to find their way home. Perhaps I'm remembering incorrectly or maybe it was false? Either way, cool article. Emergence is a cool property that shows up everywhere!

hachibu 7y ago

I wonder if this could be used as an argument for Panpsychism?

uoaei 7y ago
I'm trying to figure out a way to incorporate this notion of hierarchical life into panpsychism and the "global brain" hypothesis. (Disclaimer: I'm already sold on and a proponent of the theory of panpsychism.) It seems more and more to me like this hierarchy goes all the way up (to the single superorganism that is the universe) and all the way down (to the presence or absence of fermions in particular states, inducing a duality and thus a basis of computation via the Pauli exclusion principle). If this hierarchy is consistent across all scales, then we can conclude that if consciousness exists at one level then it exists at all levels. Sentience/awareness is a different question, mind you, and "memories" are associated with awareness of past events. I'm also starting to believe that "consciousness" in terms of directed will doesn't truly exist, and that only "experience" exists. The rest (wants, desires, opinions, will) are electrochemical reactions which respond to local changes in the environment, although we experience them as much more than that for ultimately self- (and macrosystem-)serving reasons. These electrochemical reactions are present because they have over time become more important in the processes necessary for the propagation of whatever they're supporting. This is all very vague and hand-wavy but this article on the thermodynamic theory of life might be clearer [1]. In the discussion yesterday about this topic on HN I brought up the example of ant colonies [2] in an attempt to spur discussion in this direction. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122 https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047653
- hachibu 7y ago
  Oh wow, thanks for the great reply. I didn't think anyone would respond. I'm going to dig into the links. Do you have any other suggested reading?
  - uoaei 7y ago

awinter-py 7y ago

see also this 2014 article on consciousness in 'rather dumb group entities' including 'antheads' https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721.pdf https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...

gowld 7y ago

wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms

SupplyChainGuy 7y ago

Working in Industrial Automation has given me alot of respect to ants. While I was interning at Tesla a few years back, it amazed me how 'no one person' understood the massive operations of building the model 3, but together (along with our 1000's of suppliers) we were able to make extremely advanced technology. Essentially, humans are just a more advanced version of ants. No one understands the vast amount of knowledge we've gathered, but this knowledge has allowed us to be able to sustain our vastly growing population numbers. Without this 'specialization of knowledge' or given some apocalyptic scenario, our ability to sustain our numbers would drastically decrease.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lngnmn1 7y ago

Abuse of terminology. Observed social behavior as a result of evolved instincts of unconscious individual drones does not amount for memories or anything other that instincts which contribute to social behavior.

nathias 7y ago

read GEB

jriddle567 7y ago

the internet has paths that its individual routers don't understand ;-)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

chaoticmass 7y ago

I feel like this is tangentially related: https://wiki.c2.com/?TheFiveMonkeys https://wiki.c2.com/?TheFiveMonkeys