Ants and humans have something in common: they are the only creatures in nature that consistently cooperate while transporting loads that greatly exceed their own dimensions. Prof. Ofer Feinerman used this shared trait to conduct an evolutionary competition that sheds light on group decision making, as well as on the pros and cons of cooperation versus going it alone.
The Feinerman team created a real-life version of the “piano movers puzzle,” a classic computational problem that investigates how an unusually shaped object―say, a piano―might be moved from point A to point B within a complex environment. In the team’s experiments, ants and humans were observed as they tried to move a large T-shaped object across a subdivided space connected only by narrow slits. The ant and human participants were observed as they worked alone, and in small and large groups.
To make the comparison as meaningful as possible, humans were sometimes instructed to avoid communicating with each other and were asked to hold the object by handles that measured the applied pulling force, a mechanical setup that simulated how the object was held by ants.
When working alone, the human participants’ cognitive abilities gave them an edge over ants. In groups, however, not only did ant teams perform better than individual ants, but sometimes they did better than human teams; groups of ants acted together in a strategic manner, exhibiting collective memory that helped them persist in a particular direction to avoid mistakes. Humans, on the contrary, failed to significantly improve their performance when working together.
“An ant colony is sometimes referred to as a super-organism, sort of a living body composed of multiple ‘cells’ that cooperate with one another,” Prof. Feinerman explains. “We’ve shown that ants acting as a group are smarter, and that for them the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. On the other hand, the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ that has become such a popular concept in the age of social networks did not seem to manifest in groups of human participants or improve how they got the job done.”
OFER FEINERMAN IS SUPPORTED BY:
• The Henry J. Leir Professorial Chair
• The Tom Beck Research Fellow Chair in the Physics of Complex Systems supports a staff scientist in Prof. Feinerman’s lab
