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You seem to believe this total ordering is accessible to hyenas, is there a reason you suspect this? In my mind just because these scientist found an algorithm

You seem to believe this total ordering is accessible to hyenas, is there a reason you suspect this? In my mind just because these scientist found an algorithm to model this total ordering of the pack, does not imply that there must be an algorithm actually in use in the pack. In fact, I would suspect that if the hyenas had total knowledge of the hierarchy, there would be less competition between distantly ranked hyenas, and that the model would actually calculate a shallower competition. But I don't know anything about hyenas, and I may be misunderstanding the paper.

dmurray 2y ago
If I'm reading it right, there are very few "upsets", where a hyena the scientists model as lower-ranked exerts dominance over a higher one. That suggests that even if every hyena doesn't know the total ordering of the pack, he knows whether each other hyena ranks higher or lower than him. Maintaining that knowledge doesn't absolutely require knowing the total ordering, but it's an interesting computer science problem to maintain it without.