I’m thinking of how ants find the shortest, easiest path from nest to food source and use it. What if you separated an ant’s nest and their only food source with a complicated 2 dimensional glass maze. You know, one with millions of possible paths, and all the “easy” options turn out to be duds. Would the ants as they proceed thru the maze on a daily basis, making millions of ant-trips over millions of ant-hours and miles, finally settle on the route that was the shortest, by sheer statistical enumeration. Because if they could, then you could use them to solve many intractable problems in maths like the “travelling salesmen” problem.
The idea is to use ants like an analog computer version of a supercomputer. Each ant's journey, provided it did more than just follow the leader, must add some data to the ants' knowledge of the best way there. Has such an experiment ever been done? Coz it should be. You would be using nature as a ready-built computer to solve your probs for you.
2007-03-27
23:45:28
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5 answers
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asked by
Anonymous
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Mathematics