Despite their vast differences, ants and humans share a unique trait: the capacity for cooperative object movement that is much larger than themselves. Influenced by this similarity, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers Ofer Feinerman and his colleagues looked at how ants and humans walk through a complex maze, by themselves or in groups.
The ‘piano movers puzzle’ from robotics was the maze model, in which participants maneuvered a T shaped object through interconnected chambers. Humans worked either alone or in groups of up to 26, whereas longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) functioned in teams of one to 80. To make the ants’ natural limitation, human participants were prevented from verbal or gestural communication.
It was starkly different. The maze was easily solved by solo humans using strategic planning to quickly get around. But in social groups, humans performed much worse than individuals without communication. Their “greedy” strategies focused on what they could grab now to blindly put long term progress at risk. However, ant colonies were different winners: their teamwork was exceptional. Groups of varying sizes worked together without error, and learned from errors, and adapted as a group. The ants use a sense of shared memory, and worked together efficiently, acting as a ‘super organism’.
To back that up, a previous study had demonstrated that crazy ants work collaboratively to navigate semi-natural mazes full of obstacles. But they did transport food through environments with up to 55% blockage, showing they are adaptable. The research emphasizes the complexity of collective behavior. Ant cooperation magnifies individual powers to tantamount to create a wholes more powerful than the sum of its parts. But even humans discovered that it’s hard to prioritize their priorities and work together well without communication. Not only do these insights deepen our understanding of teamwork across species, but they help us to optimize human group dynamics and move towards robotics inspired by nature’s cooperative systems.
