About
If you've got a story, picture, or link that's beyond belief, send it to tipline@haveigotoneforyou.com with your name and where you heard about it and we'll add it!
Accounts
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
October 28 2010
For Bees, Solving Tricky Math Problems Is All in a Day’s Work
Having a bee brain might not be so bad after all, since new research shows that bees are faster than supercomputers when it came to solving one of those dreadful “word problems” from (probably very advanced) high school math class.
Co-author Mathieu Lihoreau explained the significance of this discovery in a press release:
“There is a common perception that smaller brains constrain animals to be simple reflex machines. But our work with bees shows advanced cognitive capacities with very limited neuron numbers.”
The problem is called the traveling salesman problem, and the bees’ lives actually depend on solving it every day. The traveling salesman needs to visit a number of cities in the shortest amount of time, without repeating a visit. The traveling bumblebee needs to visit a number of flowers everyday, while expending as little energy as possible. Queen Mary University of London researcher Lars Chittka explained in the press release why studying bees’ habits is important:
“Such traveling salesmen problems keep supercomputers busy for days. Studying how bee brains solve such challenging tasks might allow us to identify the minimal neural circuitry required for complex problem solving.”
The supercomputer is able to solve a traveling salesman problem by comparing the length of all of the possible routes and choosing the shortest. Mathematicians (and their computer lackeys) haven’t been able to figure out how to accurately compute the best answer (instead of just comparing each option). But somehow, the bees are also able to find the right answer as quickly and correctly as humans do when the problem is presented visually. From the press release:
The team used computer controlled artificial flowers to test whether bees would follow a route defined by the order in which they discovered the flowers or if they would find the shortest route. After exploring the location of the flowers, bees quickly learned to fly the shortest route.
Finding a way to quickly and easily compute the shortest distance between a variety of points could also be useful to researchers studying the flow of traffic along streets, the communication of information over the Internet, business supply chains, and even DNA microchips.
Related content:
Discoblog: German Bees Report for Duty as Pollution Inspectors
80beats: Brainless Slime Mold Builds a Replica Tokyo Subway
DISCOVER: Quantum Honeybees
DISCOVER: Birds and Bees Do the Locomotion
DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Bees
DISCOVER: Million Dollar Math
Image: Flickr/olaeinang
August 05 2010
Here’s Your Awesomely Trippy Math Video of the Week
If you’ve ever caught yourself fantasizing about infinite series of irrational numbers while out in the woods, this video is for you. Or if you just like cool graphics.
Cristobal Vila’s Nature by Numbers:
As you may’ve noticed, an important motif in the video is the Fibonacci Sequence. The series starts with 0 and 1. After those first two, you can calculate each subsequent number in the series by adding the previous two: 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 2, 1 + 2 = 3, 2 + 3 = 5 . . . Thus 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 . . .
Among other things, the series is good for making a Fibonacci Spiral (from squares with side lengths defined by each number in the sequence) which sort of matches a Golden Spiral, which sort of matches a Nautilus shell. The complete explanation of the numbers behind the nature is available on the Vila’s website, here.
Related content:
Discoblog: Hunting Sharks Are the Mathematicians of the Seas
Discoblog: Alien Math Shows Why Grad Student Doesn’t Have a Girlfriend
Discoblog: Danger! Car Salesmen Now in Possession of “Perfect Handshake” Equation
Discoblog: The OK Go Video: Playing With the Speed of Time
Discoblog: The Mother of all Rube Goldberg Machines!
Video: Cristobal Vila Nature by Numbers
June 08 2010
World Science Festival: Will Scientists Ever Know Everything?
A mathematician, a philosopher, a physicist, and an artificial intelligence expert get together to define the limits of human knowledge. Chaos ensues.
That’s the short version of Friday evening’s World Science Festival discussion, The Limits of Understanding, where panelists Gregory Chaitin, Rebecca Goldstein, Mario Livio, and Marvin Minsky bravely tackled the scientific and philosophical implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem for a packed house.
Gödel’s work has perplexed thinkers for decades, but the on-stage team dispensed with the basics pretty quickly. As philosopher Goldstein put it, Gödel’s infamous proof from 1931 revealed that “there are true propositions [in mathematics] that can’t be proved.” Livio took a stab at incompleteness via analogy to physics: “We physicists look for a theory of everything in physics; Gödel showed that there is no theory of everything in math.”
In keeping with the theme of a theorem that overflows with philosophical implications, the ensuing conversation leapt from Gödel’s proof to evolution, the effectiveness of mathematics at describing the universe, and even the nature of consciousness. (Consciousness, Minsky insisted, is not a single thing, but is actually a catch-all term philosophers and psychologists use for 26 distinct problems about the human mind that they don’t fully understand. It was around this time that the moderator, Nobel-prize-winning biologist Paul Nurse, announced that he was “giving up” on corralling the discussion.)
One of the more interesting ideas that crept up was whether, in the wake of Gödel, math can reveal any objective, independent truths that exist “out there” in the real world, or whether it’s just a system of rules built by humans, relying on our peculiar perceptions of the universe. Livio proposed a compromise: “Are we discovering mathematics, or inventing them? It might be an intricate combination: We invent concepts and then discover the relations among them,” he said, pointing to the square root of negative one—the imaginary unit—as an invention that opened up whole new realms of discovery in math.
As for Gödel, mathematician Chaitin’s take was probably the most honest and salient: “Eighty years later, we still don’t know what the hell Gödel proved,” he said. The audience seemed happy to agree with him on that one.
Related Content:
Discoblog: World Science Festival:Waiting for Einstein’s Gravity Waves
Discoblog: World Science Festival: The Science of Star Trek
Discoblog: World Science Festival: Telling Scary Stories of Strangelets
Discoblog: World Science Festival: Listening to Illusions of Sound
Discoblog: World Science Festival: The 4 Ways to Find E.T.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
