Bees Beat Machines At 'Traveling Salesman' Problem 394
eldavojohn writes "Recent research on bumble bees has proven that the tiny bee is better than computers at the traveling salesman problem. As bees visit flowers to collect nectar and pollen they discover other flowers en route in the wrong order. But they still manage to quickly learn and fly the optimally shortest path between flowers. Such a problem is NP-Hard and keeps our best machines thinking for days searching for a solution but researchers are quite interested how such a tiny insect can figure it out on the fly — especially given how important this problem is to networks and transportation. A testament to the power of even the smallest batch of neurons or simply evidence our algorithms need work?"
great... (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, whut? (Score:3, Funny)
quite interested how such a tiny insect can figure it out on the fly
I thought we were talking about bees? I am so confused...
The answer is obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Does this mean that B >= NP?
Re:Evidence (Score:5, Funny)
It's an abbreviation for Good Old Darwinism.
What this really shows (Score:1, Funny)
What this really shows is how efficient society would be if we sterilized all workers.
Re:I doubt it (Score:5, Funny)
(I assuming we can engineer Hulks.)
Re:Entomoengineering? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Evidence (Score:1, Funny)
God has worked out these issues long before we even thought of them.
You know he doesn't like to be called that.
Grass seed? You mean CORN? (Score:5, Funny)
Gosh, that is one hell of a bee if it has the brain of a piece of corn... or is corn not a grass anymore? At least when you take some idiotic comparison, take one that has a non-changing size. Penny is okay because all pennies at least within a country tend to stay the same. But grass seeds?
Next up is "brain the size of a pinhead". Oh okay, so there are many sizes of pin but at least we can assume some kind of standard. And that is FAR smaller then most grasses I know and see seeds of in Holland.
Otherwise intresting stuff but I loathe this "make it easier" by obuscating the facts.
Number of neurons in honey bee brain = 950,000 (from Menzel, R. and Giurfa, M., Cognitive architecture of a mini-brain: the honeybee, Trd. Cog. Sci., 5:62-71, 2001.)
Now THAT is a fact. We? We got 100 billion. So, while a bee has a tiny brain compared to ours, it is HARDLY simple. And because it is far smaller and far more primitive it doesn't need as as much intelligence to deal with things it doesn't need to. Listening and producing speech is complex, but bees don't bother with that. Living for half a century and remembring everything is complex. But bees don't do that.
This why computers can do math so fast despite being so stupid, because they only do math.
How can the bee do route calculation with close to a million neurons? I have no idea but didn't research show that far fewer rat neurons could fly a plane? I think some people fastly underestimate the complexity of the brain even small ones. We already know that a neuron is far more then a simple transistor so 1 million super transistors would make for a hell of a complex computer. Suddenly it doesn't seem to odd that a bee can do computations far more complex because THAT is what it is designed to do. You could just as easily marvle at the fact that the bee with its tiny brain can fly, while I with my large brain can't. And no I don't just mean I don't have wings, I mean that if you put me in a helicopter you would have a horrible crash in seconds and that is in the passenger seat.
Marvle at nature, learn from it but don't belittle it. It takes us year to program a robot to walk very very slowly. A deer learns it in minutes and this includes learning to control legs locked up in a womb for months. We can either accept that nature is amazing or we are very very poor programmers... as a developer, I choose to believe that nature is amazing.
Re:Wait, whut? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:great... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Heuristic (Score:2, Funny)
Your tax dollars at work...
Re:Entomoengineering? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Shortcuts (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Evidence (Score:4, Funny)
Thereby substituting one guy with a beard who must be worshipped for another.
Re:Traveling Salesman?? (Score:3, Funny)
So what is the solution? Do you sleep with the farmer's daughter or sleep in the barn?
Why choose? Haven't you heard of a "roll in the hay" before?
Re:Shortcuts (Score:5, Funny)
I dunno. If only we had a word for this....something like the line that a bee would travel...
Re:Heuristic (Score:5, Funny)
It's called Ruby, and it's not a problem, it's a feature, a trendy one.
No I for one? (Score:3, Funny)
No "I for one welcome our new insect overlords"? Who are you and what have you done with Slashdot?
How are they at Ticket to Ride? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wait, whut? (Score:3, Funny)
Looks like bees are the new buzzword.
Re:Heuristic (Score:3, Funny)
[...] our brain makes its best guess based on some sort of heuristic or something to make the catch.
Maybe your brain, but not mine. Mine generally makes me miss the ball by 3 feet or get hit in the nads. Maybe my brain works like old Intel processors?
Re:Evidence (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Heuristic (Score:3, Funny)
Did you mean making the would a better place?
Re:The computer isnt going to die (Score:5, Funny)
The computer isn't going to die if it doesn't get the right path, the bee might. Death is a remarkably strong motivator to be efficient.
Don't tell my boss.
Re:Shortcuts (Score:1, Funny)
how about 'as the bee flies', orpossibly a, 'crow-line'?
Re:great... (Score:5, Funny)
Alas, it doesn't run Linux.
It run BEE-Os.
Re:great... (Score:3, Funny)
Either way, this problem sounds like it will keep computers buzzy.
Re:great... (Score:3, Funny)
Just imagine what we could have accomplished in computing if we'd stuck with B instead of moving on to C!
Re:great... (Score:4, Funny)
I always knew BeOS was underrated.
Re:Evidence (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Evidence (Score:3, Funny)
Re:great... (Score:5, Funny)
Strangely enough, we also had a problem with a travelling salesman in my community, and we successfully used bees to deal with it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1GadTfGFvU [youtube.com]
Re:great... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:great... (Score:3, Funny)
Huh, I didn't know that.
So if a "bee-wolf" upgrades the wolf to a bear, would a "bee-bear" (beobeowulf I guess?) turn it into a Tyranosaurus? Or a raptor with an RPG riding a shark?