It would seem that natures design isn’t being applied to the field of robotics alone. Bumblebees have shown that they can solve mathematical problems that can rival or even surpass supercomputers. Have you ever heard of the “Travelling Sales Man Problem”? It’s a theoretical computer science problem that, given a list of cities and their pairwise distances, tries to find the shortest route while visiting each city only once. It can take quite some time for computers to solve this problem, but for bees it’s no problem at all. Scientists at the Queen Mary and Royal Holloway, both Universities in London, have discovered that bees can solve the ‘Traveling Salesman Problem’ quite easily. Using a model of synthetic flowers, the bees consistently learn the shortest route possible even if the flowers are changed around in a different order. No other animal in nature do this, and they do it efficiently.
Professor Lars Chitkka, of Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, and his team designed a computer controlled experiment with artificial flowers that was made to test whether the bees would travel from flower to flower when it was discovered or by the shortest route possible. The bees quickly, over and over, were able to find the shortest distance between the flowers. Not bad when your brain is the size of a pinhead! Dr. Mathieu Lihoreau, of the Queen Mary University and co-researcher of the experiment, goes on to say, "There is a common perception that smaller brains constrain animals to be simple reflex machines. But our work with bees shows advanced cognitive capacities with very limited neuron numbers. There is an urgent need to understand the neuronal hardware underpinning animal intelligence, and relatively simple nervous systems such as those of insects make this mystery more tractable." This information could give us better traffic management, better flow of information on the web, and a better understanding of pollination of crops.
Should we continue to look to nature for the most efficient way to combat problems and for technical innovation? Like Einstein said, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
Eavesdropper
