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Science

Ants Best Humans At Test of Collective Intelligence (science.org) 69

Posted by BeauHD from the collective-memory dept.
Christie Wilcox reports via Science.org: Both longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) and humans can figure out how to work together to move an unwieldy object through a series of obstacles. So scientists pitted the two against each other. They had individuals and groups of different sizes of both species maneuver a T-shaped object through holes in walls (as seen in the video above), both of which were scaled to the body size of the participants. This kind of puzzle is hard for ants because their pheromone-based communication doesn't account for the kind of geometry needed to get the object through the doors. To make the experiments even more comparable, the team also took away the humans' communication in some of the trials by making them wear sunglasses and masks and forbidding talking and gestures. So the people, like the ants, had to work together without language, relying on the forces generated by their fellow participants to figure out how to move the T-shaped piece.

The groups of ants were much better at solving the puzzle than individual ants, exhibiting what the researchers described as "emergent" collective memory -- an intelligence greater than the sum of its parts. The groups of humans, on the other hand, often didn't do better when working together, especially if they weren't allowed to talk. In fact, multiple people sometimes performed worse than individuals -- and worse than the ants. The researchers posit that, in the absence of the ability to discuss and debate, individuals attempt to reach a consensus quickly rather than fully assessing the problem. This "groupthink," they suggest, leads people toward fruitless "greedy" efforts where they directly pull the T toward the gaps in the wall, rather than the less obvious, correct solution of pulling the object into the space between first. Whereas the ants "excel in cooperation," they write, humans need to be able to talk through their reasoning to avoid simply going with what they think the crowd wants. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Ants Best Humans At Test of Collective Intelligence

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  • "both of which were scaled to the body size of the participants."

    Everybody knows ants have more power for their size than (animals bigger than insects)

    • Ants are collectively unselfish. Ants act in the interest of the greater good.

      Humans? The attributes that selected for homo sapiens domination of competitors seems to have limited our propensity to prosper beyond a certain point.

      • Ants are collectively unselfish. Ants act in the interest of the greater good.

        Few people would want to live like ants, with little agency over their lives.

      • We're actually a collective species (Score:4, Insightful)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday January 09, 2025 @09:37PM (#65077041)
        We survived best when we work together. The problem is we evolved for fairly small groups and because of that we have a bunch of tribal bullshit that is completely incompatible with modern cities and more importantly modern industry and weaponry.

        So for example it's incredibly easy to turn individual groups of people against other groups of people. When you see a ruling class that's not people rising to the top through competition that's people who have figured out how to divide the underclass into various tribes.

        You see the pattern in every country. In Britain they do it with class. In India they do it with a caste system. In Japan where they didn't have any easy distinctions they used job title and kept books of family names so you knew who was beneath you on the totem pole and of course in America we use race and sexuality.

        It's the same trick over and over and over again. While we're all fighting ourselves like crabs in a bucket a handful of kings and queens or I guess now CEOs and CFOs take all the good stuff in life.

        • Blah blah blah

          Meanwhile the summary indicates the opposite. Ants worked well collectively while the humans did not. Not that anyone of that has to do with class warfare or CEO pay.

          • The entire point of my post is we evolved and work best in small groups and that doesn't scale very well because individual psychopaths can manipulate or tribal tendencies in order to capture all of the economic output for themselves.

            But that's what I get for writing it in 8th grade level. At least half the population can't understand it. It's why we elected Donald Trump president again. It's why people can't understand how tariffs lead to inflation which leads to interest rate hikes which leads to mass

      • Re:Unfair (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Thursday January 09, 2025 @10:32PM (#65077107) Homepage

        Ants are collectively unselfish. Ants act in the interest of the greater good.

        The cells of a human body are collectively unselfish. Human body cells (excepting tumors) act in the interest of the greater good.

        If you want to compare human behavior with ant behavior, the thing to compare against a human is the entire ant colony... and ant colonies are known for occasionally going to war against each other, particular when competing for resources.

        • right, plus the humans ended up solving the problem anyway, even with their communication systems turned off.

          Ants don't speak to each other as we do, they use chemicals to build communication networks, we do not. The most we can achieve with natural smells is not conducive to any collective activity at all...

      • I agree. Humans suck, and we've somehow made it a lot further than we should for such a selfish species.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Evtim ( 1022085 )

        First, we are not clones. If the ants weren't they'd behave differently.

        Sci-Fi reference: You see, dear bugger (ala OSC), we are all a hive with a single member. Every death of a human is a cessation of an unique genetic line, whereas in your case only killing the queen matters. This fundamental difference informs the behavioral differences between your hive and ours.

        Secondly, we people are the ultimate champions of cooperating in large groups. No other animal comes even close. All of us are descendants of

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Targon ( 17348 )

        It comes down to the amount of neanderthal DNA in different parts of the population. The more selfish people having more neanderthal DNA, and you see the effort to put the least intelligent in charge, because of the similarity to themselves. The rest of the population would want those at the top to actually be more capable than your typical 5th grade bully.

    • Re:Unfair (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Thursday January 09, 2025 @09:07PM (#65077003) Journal
      In addition they also "took away the humans' communication in some of the trials". So the fact that our intelligence enables us to communicate effectively to coordinate and share ideas to accomplish complex tasks was denied. All this study has shown is that yes, if you handicap humans enough then you can actually overcome the advantage of their intelligence.

      I wonder what's next in this exciting line of research: bats better than blindfolded humans at finding things?

    • This is called "scaling". Any comparison between a small animal and large animal using physical properties of each will be misleading and wrong. Where do these clowns come up with this kind of nonsense research? Maybe it was a government sponsored study. :(

    • Everybody knows ants have more power for their size

      Watch the video. It was not a test of strength.

      But it was a stupid test. The humans were prohibited from talking or gesturing, while inter-ant communication was unrestricted.

      All it showed is that humans don't have group intelligence when mechanisms for group intelligence are prohibited.

  • Not really. (Score:3)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday January 09, 2025 @08:56PM (#65076983)

    To summarize, emergent cognitive faculties allow large ant groups to employ a heuristic that is reminiscent of the well-known “right-hand rule,” in which, upon entering a maze, the solver slides their right hand along the wall and proceeds forward without changing their direction.

    Simple cognition follows simple rules.

    Obviously they put restrictions on what people can do. They even tested with and without restricted communication. They didn't have group of humans on a similar scale as the ants and they didn't allow for someone to act as a scout/director.

    There is value to this study but idea that ants have superior collective intelligence is click-bait BS that completely discounts the fact that humans organize differently than ants.

  • Cool (Score:3)

    by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Thursday January 09, 2025 @08:59PM (#65076993)
    Cool, now let's see one make a cappuccino.

  • Agile? (Score:5, Funny)

    by VampireByte ( 447578 ) on Thursday January 09, 2025 @09:11PM (#65077011) Homepage

    When the ants encountered a problem, their solution didn't start with "We need a Jira subscription."

    • The ants also had dozens standing around and not participating in the moving of the "T" where the humans didn't. That obviously made it a union operation which is why they succeeded. Maybe layers of middle management got it done quicker.

      Then again, if you take the time it took and multiple by *all* of the ants/people present, then it took fewer ant/person hours for the humans.

    • No, they threw an OUT OF CHEESE error and demanded the FTB module be reinstalled.....

  • Sounds like a better society than we have now. (Score:5, Funny)

    by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Thursday January 09, 2025 @09:45PM (#65077057)

    The researchers posit that, in the absence of the ability to discuss and debate, individuals attempt to reach a consensus quickly rather than fully assessing the problem. This "groupthink," they suggest, leads people toward fruitless "greedy" efforts where they directly pull the T toward the gaps in the wall, rather than the less obvious, correct solution of pulling the object into the space between first. Whereas the ants "excel in cooperation," they write, humans need to be able to talk through their reasoning to avoid simply going with what they think the crowd wants.

    I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. They seem to be focused on an existence of cooperation and less hive-mind thinking.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. They seem to be focused on an existence of cooperation and less hive-mind thinking.

      Isn't hive-mind thinking the social insects' primary MO?

  • Priceless statement from the paper (Score:4, Funny)

    by dsgrntlxmply ( 610492 ) on Thursday January 09, 2025 @09:55PM (#65077067)
    "We incubated the loads in cat food overnight and rubbed canned tuna on them, which made them seem like attractive food items to the ants.". I haven't read far enough to see how they baited the test object for humans.

  • I’d like to see how they would perform if they went up against creatures that are many times smarter than humans. Like dolphins or lizards for example.

  • Dumb (Score:3)

    by mosb1000 ( 710161 ) <mosb1000@mac.com> on Thursday January 09, 2025 @11:36PM (#65077175)

    Humans are not good at working together when you take away their ability to communicate with each other?! Nobody could have foreseen this.

  • So it's possible to devise a test (Score:3)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Thursday January 09, 2025 @11:45PM (#65077189) Homepage

    in which ants can beat humans. OK wow.

    Ants can lift several hundred times their body weight, humans can't. Why would we expect human strength to scale proportionally to their size?

    Some animals are stronger than humans, some can fly, some can swim better than humans. There are examples all over the animal kingdom, of animals that can outperform humans in various tasks. Yes, even ants.

    If you're going to say that ants are smarter than humans, it's time for them to start paying taxes.

  • Humans in groups are not smart (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday January 10, 2025 @02:15AM (#65077279)

    Individuals may be smart or not, but humans in groups are generally not smart at all except when very carefully selected.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cstacy ( 534252 )

      Individuals may be smart or not, but humans in groups are generally not smart at all except when very carefully selected.

      Have you met my friend Agent K?

      On the other hand: Crowdsourcing.

  • I suspect humans would beat them soundly at independent actions

  • Nuclear or biological, asteroid or virus...
    Nature will start over again.
    Probably with the bees.

    Find gate. Open gate. Close gate. Run run run!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

      Bullshit.

      If we go extinct you can't just imagine that another intelligent species will come along.

      "Nature will start over again."

      Nature is not optimized to promote intelligence, just survival. There is no golden path that we were on that nature uses to create more intelligent creatures.

      You are living in a wish fulfilment dream.

  • This is obviously just "scare" news,
    stirring up anti-bug sentiment.
    They're not coming for us.

    WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN MORE?

  • Ants are smarter than humans, because humans assume ants have no "language", and devise comparative studies based on that, in order to prove...I'm not sure what the point is supposed to be?

  • US: Deport the ants !!
    UK: Ban myrmecophobia (ant-o-phobia) !!

  • I, for one, welcome our ant overlords!
  • Ants show how decentralized activity can still operate as if it was centralized. There is no one ant that understands the problem, but together they solve it. I think this parallels how neurons create intelligent behavior, there is no special essence of consciousness or homunculus in the brain
  • Did they remove the hands from the humans, too? Of course, if you penalize the humans enough, they will lose. That doesn't mean ants are better.

  • limits (Score:2)

    by Tom ( 822 )

    The groups of humans, on the other hand, often didn't do better when working together, especially if they weren't allowed to talk

    No shit, Sherlock. Humans can't cooperate well when you take away their means of cooperation. Who'd have thought?

    The study is interesting, but the conclusions are false. It doesn't prove that ants are better than humans. To level the playing field, do the study again, but this time a) don't limit the humans and/or b) take away the ants' pheromones.

  • "None of us is as dumb as all of us."

  • Take away humans sight and the ability to communicate and pit them against ants in a task that ants have been doing for millions of years.

    Yeah. Totally legit research.

  • The researchers took a very specific species of ants (P. longicornis) which are well known to excel at 'cooperative transport' and collective behavior. They then took completely random children ages 10 and above and adults who responded to an advertisement at the Weizmann Institute of Science, with no prior relationship. In order to properly answer the question "Are Ants Best Humans At Test of Collective Intelligence", and in order for this test to be scientifically valid, either random ants from random

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