Bees Beat Machines At 'Traveling Salesman' Problem

eldavojohn writes "Recent research on bumble bees has proven that the tiny bee is better than computers at the traveling salesman problem. As bees visit flowers to collect nectar and pollen they discover other flowers en route in the wrong order. But they still manage to quickly learn and fly the optimally shortest path between flowers. Such a problem is NP-Hard and keeps our best machines thinking for days searching for a solution but researchers are quite interested how such a tiny insect can figure it out on the fly — especially given how important this problem is to networks and transportation. A testament to the power of even the smallest batch of neurons or simply evidence our algorithms need work?"

Comments

Evidence

[DarkKnightRadick]

Simply evidence that our algorithms need work. God has worked out these issues long before we even thought of them. (:

Re:Evidence

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Impossible, because there are no gods. Although, in your defense, we did invent god before we wrote the first algorithm. Once we reached the point in evolution where we could formally express an algorithm, god already sounded like a ridiculous idea to us. Only very primitive minds, like yours, can believe in such a ridiculous idea.