Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 159 posts

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

#91

Post by sinsterizme »

ajuc wrote: post #88
goatlover wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes - the system (you + the book) know Chinese. Or the system knows how to translate from English to Chinese. Human language isn't simply about following translation rules, though. It's also about communication and expressing thought. Or participating in language games. > Let me ask you another question - when I throw a ball at you your subconcious brain has to solve a differential equation to know how to use muscl…

> Why suppose the neural network needs to solve differential equations? Is that the only way to learn to catch a ball? Yes. You need to decide where to put your hand, how to orient it, etc in reaction to the ball movement. The answer is a solution to the differential equations, and you cannot consistently get a good answer to an equation if you don't solve it. The solution probably isn't symbolic but numeric, but tha…

I don’t think because we can solve the problem with differential equations necessarily means that our subconscious mind is solving it in the same way. There’s certainly other possible explanations

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

#92

Post by loceng »

anonytrary wrote: post #2

> 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 e…

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.

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

#93

Post by ComputerGuru »

pure-awesome wrote: post #81
wh1t3n01s3 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardcover version is only 814.57$

My goodness, would you look at that! Luckily the paperback is only 1% the price, so solid deal there! I thought it's a data entry error, but no, it looks like that's the legitimate price range for the NEW hardcovers (the actual listed ones are even more!): https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0007JVUSK/ref=dp_ol... It's either a ripoff, or some sort of collector's edition original versions. Though if it were the…

They’re priced by different algorithms that “outbid” each other.

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

#94

Post by dibujaron »

yesbabyyes wrote: post #70
dragonwriter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But my theory falls apart with the reproduction system. We don't really reproduce other 'countries'. Sure we do. The UK has a whole lot of offspring, for instance.

Offspring, perhaps. But kidnapping is not reproduction.

I'd say it's reproduction, it's just not voluntary reproduction. Every time a culture invades another, you can think of it as creating a new culture that has the "genes" of the previous two. Examples include the influence of the moors on Spain, the changes to the English language due to the Norman conquest, and the modern unique Afrikaner culture of South Africa.

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

#95

Post by blotter_paper »

loceng wrote: post #92
anonytrary wrote: post #2

> 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 e…

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…

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.

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

#96

Post by fermenflo »

> 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!

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

#97

Post by awb »

anonytrary wrote: post #2

> 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 e…

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.

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

#98

Post by dibujaron »

hliyan wrote: post #48
mFixman wrote: post #36

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".

There is a theory (albeit unfalsifiable) that collections of communicating agents (such as human beings) may give rise to a higher order consciousness that the individual agents are not aware of, and therefore must necessarily interpret the 'will' of the higher order consciousness as merely 'emergent behavior'.

Easy enough to see in practice, though. It's fun to think of corporations as larger organisms. They regularly fight each other, eat each other, get eaten by each other, die, and reproduce. Google acquiring a startup is not much different from a whale eating a shrimp. The same analogies can be made for countries and cities, too.

It's also fun to think of yourself as a giant city of smaller organisms - you've got white blood cell cops, you've got red blood cells which are basically cars on arterial highways, you've got factories and garbage trucks and libraries.

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

#99

Post by Psyladine »

wsc981 wrote: post #62
tobinfricke wrote: post #4

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-smar...

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 situ…

>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.

I wish Taleb would give more on identifying & learning on a systems wide approach. For abstractions and "less than obvious" spheres this becomes difficult to separate the forest from the tree, or is the forest the system, or the genera of the plant in question, or its bordering systems, etc... behaviors and patterns which are emergent only at the individual level make '10,000 foot views' harder to perceive, let alone examine and extrapolate from "obey very simple rules"

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

#100

Post by ghettoimp »

cdo256 wrote: post #46
mFixman wrote: post #36

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".

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1] explores this exact question. In the story, a human consciousness is uploaded to a computer orbiting a planet. Meanwhile spiders on the planet go though an industrial revolution and start using ant colonies as computers, using pheromones to control the behavior of the ants. Over thousands of years the computer housing the orbital consciousness begins to fail and transmits he…

This was a fantastic book, and the first thing I thought of when seeing the article.
Post reply on HN