Abstracts

Information biology

To study the communication and intelligence in social animals we have suggested a new approach based on the ideas of Information Theory. The new set of experiments based on the same approach is presented. The first idea is based on that in a "reasonable" communication system the frequency of use of a certain message and the length of that message must correlate. The second idea is that when using a complicated numerical system, one has to add and subtract small numbers. For example, when using the Roman figures, VII = V + II, IX = X - I, etc. In our experiments the ants had to transmit the information about the coordinates of a "branch" situated on a long "trunk". Each branch ended in an empty trough, except for one filled with syrup. The food was placed on different branches with different frequencies: on the preliminarily chosen, "special" branches an award occured much more frequently than on the others. For example, in 1993 we chose two "special" branches - 10 and 20 on which the food occured with a probability of 1/3 for each of them, while for any of the other 28 branches the probability was 1/84. When the ants had learnt this, they changed the way they transmitted the information about the coordinates of the branch containing food. The time required for transmitting a message "the trough with food is on the branch N 10" or "N 20" by the ants considerably decreased, and so did the messages about branches in the vicinity of the "special" ones - 10 and 20. The analysis of the data suggested that the ants used a method of "representing" the numbers similar to the Roman figures, and the "special" numbers (10 and 20 in this case) played the same role as the "special" Roman figures V, X, L etc. Thus, the ants seem to be able to add and subtract small numbers.

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©2001, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Science, Novosibirsk
©2001, United Institute of Computer Science SB RAS, Novosibirsk
©2001, Institute of Computational Techologies SB RAS, Novosibirsk
©2001, A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems SB RAS, Novosibirsk
©2001, Institute of Mathematics SB RAS, Novosibirsk
©2001, Institute of Cytology and Genetics SB RAS, Novosibirsk
©2001, Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics SB RAS, Novosibirsk
©2001, Novosibirsk State University
Last modified 06-Jul-2012 (11:45:21)