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

Re:Shortcuts

[MozeeToby]

Which makes the problem more difficult, not less. The way it is usually presented in CS the distance between the nodes is the minimum cost path, the bees would also have to 'calculate' that in addition to solving for the correct order. Think about it this way, imagine trying to solve the traveling salesman path between 100 cities, but you can take any route you want between cities. You could take all the back roads, the freeway, you could hop on a train or an airplane, you could kayak down the river between two cities. It doesn't make the problem any easier, in fact it adds a ton more variables to the mix, effectively increasing the number of routes that would need to be checked using a brute force solution.

Re:Oh, really?

[gumbi west]

100 flowers=100! possibilities. Using brute force on a 1 GHz processor and computing one solution per cycle (quite optimistic), it would take you 3 times 10 to the 141 years to complete. Even if your cellphone had a helaflop processor, it would still take longer than the age of the universe to compute this way.

Re:Evidence

[Jedi Alec]

Question is...did the bees evolve to find the corner cases, or did the plants evolve so the damn bees could find them in the first place? After all, plants that are stupid enough to hide from bees while simultaneously needing them to reproduce would stand a good chance of not making it to the next generation ;-)