• Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      With humans, you pay them to move your sofa with beer. With ants, they’re happy picking up crumbs from the carpet.

      The hard part is convincing them to leave afterwards.

  • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Makes we wonder what the optimal group size is for human intelligence. Induvidually we can be consistently pretty smart, and in very large groups we’re brazenly idiotic even when the group is composed entierly of induvidually smart people. Yet most important research these days requires a team, so there must be some (likely fairly small) optimal group size to optimize useful intelligence/person.

    • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      I’d like to see a larger group of people doing this with extremely limited communication. Like if you had 100-200 people only allowed to push the shape with their mouse cursor in a web app. I have a feeling we’d end up with similar results to the ant time-lapse.

      Basically like the collaborative canvas projects around April fools.

    • xkbx@startrek.website
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      2 days ago

      In my head, I was just thinking “a whole bunch of different ants brute-forcing it until it works isn’t intelligence.” Then I saw the video where they’re actively rotating it after it isn’t going in and realized, holy shit, I’d still be trying to push it.

  • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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    1 day ago

    Amazing. “Something” is definitely aware of rotation, “fits”/shapes and taking a step back from a local minimum to move forward. Seeing them all done together is even more impressive. What else are “they” aware of and…how many do you need to have this team spatial awareness? 100?

    • Phoenix3875@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      From the article:

      People attempted to solve the puzzle because they were instructed to, while ants were motivated to carry the load to the third chamber (which was open toward the nest) since the load was made to resemble food.

      • Big_Boss_77@lemmynsfw.com
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        1 day ago

        I missed the link to the article too… what I get for navigation lemmy under the influence of Christmas cheer. Thank you for the assist, neighbor.

    • Dagamant@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Either it’s full of food or the entire nest is just that blank acrylic and they want to add it to their nest. Probably food though.