8 ms·
That's insanely impressive and almost scary level of adaptation/smart behaviour from the ants. Edit: it feels more like something you'd read from Adrian Czajko
by eigenket 3y ago
That's insanely impressive and almost scary level of adaptation/smart behaviour from the ants.
Edit: it feels more like something you'd read from Adrian Czajkowski/Tchaikovsky rather than reality.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago90% reduction in mortality. Wow.
- 20after4 3y agoHave you seen what else ants can do? They are full of insanely impressive/scary/smart behaviors. Ants farm aphids. They don't just find aphids and collect their "honeydew" excretions. They actually bring the aphids to the plants and then tend to them. Ants harvest the sunflower seeds from my sunflowers. Not just some of the seeds. If I leave the flowers even one day past the time to harvest those seeds, the ants get every single seed. They do it by having some ants up on the flower popping out the seeds, and more ants down below collecting them off the ground. That's some incredible coordination. And these are tiny ants, not some big powerful ants. It's mind boggling to think any creature is able to pull it off. I'm honestly surprised they don't have megalithic structures built of huge stones. Though their underground colonies are megalithic in scale compared to the ants. Maybe instead of ancient aliens we should look into ants as the actual builders of the pyramids.
- eigenket 3y agoI've seen and heard a lot of what they can do, but certainly not everything. Pretty sure humanity as a whole is very far from understanding everything ants do and why.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bloopernova 3y agoAnts can pass the mirror test too, which only a very select few mammals/birds have passed. https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-that-have-passed-the-mirror-test/ https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-t...
- Nick87633 3y agoMirror test of LLMs might be an interesting experiment to design!
- waffleiron 3y agoThe mirror test would be less interesting if we could program/teach animals to pass or fail it. So I wouldn’t be impressed if a LLM is able to pass these types of tests.
- klyrs 3y agoWhat is an LLM? Is it the trained weights? The source code? The frontend? Where do you even hold the mirror?
- speed_spread 3y agoYou get it to talk with itself.
- datameta 3y agoWait, I think that might recursively turn into the singularity. So we can do it now, but around GPT-6.5 or LLaMa 5, unless this transformer-based explosion maxes out our silicon circuit tech by then, be careful.
- speed_spread 3y agoI call dibs on this new concept of singularity-as-a-service.
- klyrs 3y agoMild suggestion: experiment first. LLMs have been observed to emit nonsense such as getting stuck indefinitely emitting the same token, etc. Do you really want dibs on that?
- ants_everywhere 3y agoAnts really are incredible. Not only do they farm aphids, they also farm fungus. Leafcutter ants bring the leaves to their fungus farm. Then they eat the fungus. So ants farm both livestock and crops. They also form super colonies.
- datameta 3y agoThat's an obscene cognition/cooperation to body weight ratio.
- eigenket 3y agoI would guess(without much evidence) that you don't need much cognition in each individual ant. You can get very complex behaviours out of very simple rules in idealised systems like cellular automata. My bias (for essentially aesthetic reasons) is to assume that each ant is basically pretty dumb, and the cool complex behaviors happen as an emergent property of how they respond to the stimuli they recieve (especially all the pheromone messages they get from other ants).
- hdyddbbbbbb 3y ago[dead]
- datameta 3y agoI have a similar hunch. They seem to be a distributed sensor, compute, and actuator network.
- SCM-Enthusiast 3y ago>each ant is basically pretty dumb, and the cool complex behaviors happen as an emergent property of how they respond to the stimuli they recieve (especially all the pheromone messages they get from other ants). Can't ants be swapped out as humans here?
- 20after4 3y agoThey farm MY crops. Little bastards. >D
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoThere was an episode of Cosmos[0], where Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about bees, and shows how they are actually a hive intelligence that could be compared to us. Ants have a similar hivemind. It was pretty awesome. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubE9hjrsHmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubE9hjrsHmI
- shiroiuma 3y agoThe ants already sound much smarter than humans. Ants: use antibiotics to treat wounds Human: I'm not using that! It has microchips from Bill Gates in it!
- pjmlp 3y agoWell, it helps that ants don't question their overlords.
- bouvin 3y agoThe real beauty is that ants do not have overlords – their intelligent behaviour is emergent, not centrally controlled.
- datadeft 3y agoYep it is kind of surprising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony#Colony_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony#Colony_structure
- pjmlp 3y agoAnts don't rebel against the ways of their society, each ant knows their place and doesn't have aspirations to be something else, other than what it was predestined to be at birth. I guess there are a couple of movies about that. :)
- ssener2001 3y agotiny animals like ants cannot know order and balance . They are like tiny robots. By carrying out duties far exceeding its own power, everything testifies to the All-Powerful One’s existence "Yes, the All-Wise Creator summarizes the principles of the Clear Book in most beautiful form and abbreviated fashion and with a particular pleasure and through a special need, and includes them in beings. If everything acts thus with a particular pleasure out of a particular need, it unknowingly conforms to the principles of the Clear Book." Quran's Light
- pharrington 3y agoAnts have been doing the whole "advanced civilization" before long before humans even evolved. There's a ton of stuff we still have to learn about, and from, them. edit - didn't see eigenket's comment basically saying the same thing
- sillywalk 3y ago> Ants farm aphids and also fungus https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-ants-became-worlds-best-fungus-farmers-180962871/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-ants-becam... https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-leafcutter-ants-evolved-into-sophisticated-farmers/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-leafcutter-ants-...
- BelleOfTheBall 3y agoI'm amused that people call ants doing pretty human behavioral quirks "scary". Obviously the implication is that they're smarter than we knew, but I'm giggling imagining some other species going "Have you seen what humans can do?" and then just describing the beef industry, Boston Dynamics robot dogs or Facebook.
- kombookcha 3y agoHey, two out of those three things are kinda scary!
- janosdebugs 3y agoTwo?
- 20after4 3y agoYeah I was wondering which one of those gets a pass. All three are terrifying IMO.
- RCitronsBroker 3y agomost definitely not the botson dynamics robot dogs, that’s wayy too DARPA to be not scary as hell
- 867-5309 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalhead_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalhead_(Black_Mirror)
- 20after4 3y agoHumans are absolutely terrifying. The most scary and dangerous of all creatures. I'm sure humans kill far more than any other animal. Perhaps only bacteria and viruses exceed the level of scary that humans have attained. But ants are pretty damn close to human levels of scary, IMO. Look up the acid spitting crazy ants and tell me that's not a little bit scary.
- ycombinete 3y agoI would love to see a timelapse of them harvesting the sunflowers, that is absolutely incredible.
- 20after4 3y agoThat is an awesome idea. I will try to remember that this summer. I always grow a lot of sunflowers each year so there are plenty of opportunities to shoot something like that.
- ycombinete 3y agoDo link me to the video if you do. I've always loved watching ants do their thing. I used to feed ants to watch them, and even witnessed some and ant wars in my garden as a child. I would have spent days watching them harvest sunflower seeds!
- eurekin 3y agoI'm especially surprised a tiny milligram worth of brain is able to provide such high level functions and coordination. I'd normally expect all those neurons would be occupied fully with processing visual stimuli, smells and coordination limb movement alone.
- eigenket 3y agoI guess just hard to tell how much of that is attributable to cognition inside the brain of each ant, and how much is network effects with each ant responding in individually stupid ways to the pheromone (and other) signals they create. Each ant could be very dumb while the system of ants as a whole are quite "smart" (I.e. exhibit complex and interesting behaviours).
- eurekin 3y agoHow is learning performed than? By means of genetic evolution - on the level of a individual or the whole colony (queens mutations)?
- eigenket 3y agoI guess it happens on multiple levels. No reason it would be exclusive to one. Certainly individual ants learn stuff https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190778 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190778 But adaptions also happen by evolution and (very speculatively) might also happen at the colony level by it changing its responses somehow. E.g. I could imagine an ant colony suddenly faced with many attackers adapting by breeding more soldiers.
- luqtas 3y agothey also have a really organized division of labor, like "some wait at the nest for some days, then after the ones who went out get tired, the resting ones assume their positions etc." https://antsauthority.com https://antsauthority.com :D
- bayindirh 3y agoAssuming only the humans have certain traits or level of intelligence/knowledge in some areas of life becomes a more foolish act as we discover what other living things are capable of. I, for one, welcome our ant overlords.
- Voultapher 3y agoOne could call it a human suprematist mindset.
- SCM-Enthusiast 3y agoor anty-human.
- atticora 3y ago> That's insanely impressive and almost scary level of adaptation I fully agree while thinking the same thing about our immune system behavior. The insanely scary impressive thing is that this level of adaptation is the rule not the anomaly in biological systems.
- janandonly 3y agoI'm surprised I don't have nightmares from his book with the planner filled with ants that are elevated to intelligence
- JoBrad 3y agoI think the ants are still used as mostly dumb workers.
- SCM-Enthusiast 3y agowith fire!
- kromem 3y agoThey also seem to pass the mirror test: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9881685/#:~:text=When%20exposed%20to%20a%20mirror,same%20color%20as%20their%20body https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9881685/#:~:tex....
- kromem 3y agoLink to the PDF of the research itself for those interested: https://www.journalofscience.net/showpdf/MjY4a2FsYWkxNDc4NTIzNjk= https://www.journalofscience.net/showpdf/MjY4a2FsYWkxNDc4NTI...