Bees can link symbols to numbers, study finds

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-bees-link.html

by dnetesn • 7 years ago

163 63 7 years ago

phys.org

amelius2• 7 years ago

How do we know the bees don't simply use a learned lookup-table rather than doing arithmetic?

During evaluation, did they present the bees with problems that they didn't see before?

gpderetta• 7 years ago

How do we know that humans do not? My mental process for simple arithmetic does seem to involve multiple something that feels like lookup tables.

edna314• 7 years ago

Yes, the difference is that you can synthesize numbers which are not (yet) in the look up table. It would be super amazing if one could show that bees are capable of doing that.

lelf2• 7 years ago

But where is the line between a “learned lookup-table” and “actually doing arithmetic”?

Especially considering how numbers were presented to bees = number of shapes in a square (look at the second paper in my other comment).

maxxxxx7• 7 years ago

I use a lookup table for arithmetic. Figuring out 5*3 would take me a long time if I didn’t know already.

kowdermeister• 7 years ago

Exactly, that's why it takes an awkward long time multiplying two numbers greater than 10 in my head, anything less is instant.

lawlessone• 7 years ago

How do we know the bees don't simply use a learned lookup-table

That was basically how i was taught times tables in school as a child, and many others.

taneq2• 7 years ago

Yeah, do they not teach times tables in school these days? O.o

romwell3• 7 years ago

How do we know the bees don't simply use a learned lookup-table?

Perhaps by reading the freely available original paper[0], where we find that the bees were tested on samples with randomized positions, and which included shapes previously unseen by bees.

So the bees aren't using lookup tables to count.

We all, though, use lookup tables to map numbers to single digits: that's by definition. The digit 7 represents this many objects: * * * * * *; you need to memorize this after you learn to count.

The experiment doesn't establish the bees' ability to parse decimal notation (mapping numbers to character strings).

[0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2019...

amelius2• 7 years ago

which included shapes previously unseen by bees

This only shows that bees can abstract away from the actual shapes, not that they actually count.

menzoic• 7 years ago

Reminds me of Neil deGrasse Tyson's comments on the "intelligence gap".

If bees can do this, how smart are we really? Compared to generally intelligent AI or extraterrestrials, the difference between our intelligence and a bees might not be much.

https://youtu.be/Tt0uV5d8tss

BlackDinosaur• 7 years ago

that's an interesting thought tbh

maxxxxx7• 7 years ago

I always think what the perspectives of a being that could live for millions of years and had the computing power and memory and sensors of all of Earths machines would be. I don’t think we could even comprehend the thoughts of this being.

SantalBlush• 7 years ago

I suspect that being would get insufferably bored.

vchak1• 7 years ago

It may well be that we are subject to evolution, but the being is not -- in which case the situation would be really interesting.

TeMPOraL3• 7 years ago

If you zoom out, the market - or even further, our civilization - is such a being. Only couple thousand years old, and essentially developed its nervous systems only in the last few decades, but already its thoughts are incomprehensible.

taneq2• 7 years ago

The thing is, it's not that hard for an animal (or a machine) to do one thing that we do, sometimes even to do it better than we do. But doing everything that we do, in the same package, is really, really hard.

umvi• 7 years ago

The thing that blows my mind about humans is how adaptable our bodies are to virtually any task, terrain, climate, etc.

Goats are, in general, much better climbers than humans. But the best human climbers are WAY better than the best goat climbers. For example, I've never seen a goat climb El Cap.

Beavers, on average, are much better dam builders than humans. But the best human dam builders are WAY better than the best beaver dam builders.

Rinse and repeat for nearly anything.

Cybiote• 7 years ago

Your question is excellent but I sort of arrive at an opposite conclusion. Before I explain, I want to point out that bees and jumping spiders are exceptional as far as insect* intelligence goes.

The gist of my view is that evolution is the mother of all demo scene hackers. Imagine a programmer that build amazing AIs on whatever hardware you give it, whether a top of the line GPU or an old PIC microcontroller.

The AIs runnable on both will not be fully equicapable† but the fact that you could get the PIC to do abstract learning or image recognition and learning at all will be incredible. It's like the fact that you can get a strong Chess AI running in just a few kb doesn't mean that Stockfish9 is unimpressive. It's rather, that such a strong chess AI can exist given such few resources is impressive.

Regarding intelligent AIs or space aliens with more computational resources, I'm biased but, I do think they'd be impressed with what we can do with only 20 watts or thereabouts.

* Yes I know spiders are not insects.

† Corvids and parrots are sort of exceptions to this. They can outperform certain primates even though they have smaller brains, fewer neurons (even if still high) while using less energy.

nathan_long2• 7 years ago

If bees can do this, how smart are we really?

Well, bees don't invent controlled experiments to test our symbolic reasoning, think through the results, form philosophical questions using arbitrarily complex language structures, and post them on the own worldwide information-sharing networks they invented. So I'd say there's a pretty big gap.

Compared to generally intelligent AI or extraterrestrials, the difference between our intelligence and a bees might not be much.

Assuming that intelligence can be quantified, and that extremely higher values are physically possible, yes, the orders-of-magnitude difference between bees and humans might theoretically be dwarfed by some other comparison. Just like the size difference between a grain of sand and a mountain is not significant compared with the difference between the mountain and the Milky Way. But it's still a massive (get it?) difference.

lelf2• 7 years ago

Non-paywalled papers:

• Symbolic representation of numerosity by honeybees (Apis mellifera): matching characters to small quantities https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.023...

• Numerical cognition in honeybees enables addition and subtraction https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/2/eaav0961

tr33house• 7 years ago

bees can link symbols to symbols?

romwell3• 7 years ago

No. Small quantities are represented with previously unseen symbols in randomized positions.

This is what numbers are (cardinals, or equivalence classes of sets under bijection, if you wish).

So bees can count.

eddd• 7 years ago

you don't need many neurons to do MNIST.

empath75• 7 years ago

Seems like one set of researchers has had two breakthrough studies of bee intelligence. Has anyone reproduced this? I feel like for something this incredible, we should perhaps wait until another team can reproduce the results before getting too excited.

yters3• 7 years ago

Don't most animals have the ability to learn associations? E.g. when the leash jingles the dog knows it is time to go for a walk. Not sure this is the same as humans doing arithmetic. Scientists seem quite anxious to make the jump from associations to human level abstract thought, for some reason.

Not saying it is impossible, but these kinds of studies seem very handwavy and not very careful with terminology.

nathan_long2• 7 years ago

I think the "abstract" part here was the concept of "three-ness" or "two-ness" - that the bees could see something that represents 3 and correctly choose the path with three shapes, regardless of what the shapes were.

yters3• 7 years ago

Based on the picture of the experiment setup in the article, it's hard to infer the bee understands 'three-ness'.

Based on this reasoning, does the bee already understand 'flowerness' since it knows to get nectar from many different kinds of flowers?

Do dogs understand 'dogness' because they know to sniff the butt of any dog that crosses their path?

Pretty sure I can create a simple AI that can distinguish three of something under many different kinds and orientations within suitable constraints, and have that capability associated with another easily distinguishable visual code. Yet, I would never say I've made my computer understand 'threeness', as the computer has no abstract reasoning capabilities whatsoever.

In general, how do we know when something understands '____ness' in the way we understand '____ness'? Per my previous examples, either the article's meaning is trivial, or unsubstantiated.

palijer• 7 years ago

I expect one of these days I'll see an article titled "Bees proven to be Turing-Complete"

rdruxn• 7 years ago

This really reminds me of the intelligent AI bees in Permutation City by Greg Egan

n4bz0r• 7 years ago

"Bee.js — a fast and modern bee framework written in javascript"

YeGoblynQueenne3• 7 years ago

> Researchers have trained honeybees to match a character to a specific quantity, revealing they are able to learn that a symbol represents a numerical amount.

I don't know if this is very convincing. From what I see in the images shown in the article, the "specific quantities" are represented by different arrangements of various symbols- squares, stars etc.

The article doesn't say whether these arrangements were randomised in each image.

For instance - the number "3" could be _always_ associated with the same arrangement of any symbol. Say, a triangle formed by three identical symbol. In that case it would be impossible to know whether the bees learned to count the shapes or just identify their arrangment. Learning to identify a triangle doesn't say anything about the ability to identify quantities.

The fact that neither of the two groups trained on the two different tasks (character-to-quantity and quantity-to-character) could generalise their learning to the opposite task also doesn't bode well. It is exactly what you would expect to see if the setup for each task had some other, uncontrolled for, variable that the bees "overfitted" to, rather than learning what is theorised they did learn.

ordu3• 7 years ago

The article doesn't say whether these arrangements were randomised in each image.

It is a popular science retelling a story. In the original scientific article we can read

We used sets of stimuli with controlled surface area (set 1) and equal element size area (set 2) with achromatic properties (black elements on white background; electronic supplementary material, figure S1). The choice of stimuli for each trial was pseudo-randomized with regards to set (1 or 2), shape and arrangement of elements. Thus, bees were trained on both set 1 and set 2.

In Group 1, this test consisted of showing a sign as the sample and then a randomized set of abstract objects not previously seen by bees (set 3: random set with chromatic properties).

Your proposed possible mistake is a way too stupid for a modern experimental psychology.

For instance - the number "3" could be _always_ associated with the same arrangement of any symbol. Say, a triangle formed by three identical symbol.

It is more interesting, I believe. I had not read the original article thoroughly enough to find out could this be as you describe. There is a figures with some stimuli, but I'm not sure that it contains all the stimuli (to be sure it needs more reading, not just skimming).

Maybe this issue needs more testing, but in any case it is impossible to catch all the mistakes like that. For example, our ability to see a figure formed by a changing symbols, it is a property of our visual processing. Bees could have some properties which we do not have, and it could be that their properties could allow them to see some shapes formed by symbols, where we could see just randomly placed symbols.

The fact that neither of the two groups trained on the two different tasks (character-to-quantity and quantity-to-character) could generalise their learning to the opposite task also doesn't bode well. It is exactly what you would expect to see if the setup for each task had some other, uncontrolled for, variable that the bees "overfitted" to, rather than learning what is theorised they did learn.

Yes, it is the most interesting part, because it goes perpendicular to a common sense, and thus gives a direction to a subsequent research. It always work like this: an experiment (a good one does) reveals something about nature, but poses new questions. Then researchers all over the world start to spend their grants on a sequels for the first research. At some point the number of articles becomes overwhelming, and several especially proficient scientists read all of them, studying methodology, combining data from different research into one big data set, making statistics, and finally they'd write a meta-research with a few hundreds of references to experimental articles, trying to make sense of data.

Media just cherry-picking articles with a clickbait titles, and makes them even more clickbaity. The most interesting articles for a newcomer would be a meta-research articles, which do no sparky experiments itself, but analyze all the data they could reach.

kazinator• 7 years ago

Your proposed possible mistake is a way too stupid for a modern experimental psychology.

Bees have psychology now?

YeGoblynQueenne3• 7 years ago

> In Group 1, this test consisted of showing a sign as the sample and then a randomized set of abstract objects not previously seen by bees (set 3: random set with chromatic properties).

Thanks for the clarification.

It's clear you find this subject very interesting. I guess I do too, but I'm very skeptical of claims like in the above article. I think it's very easy to fall prey to various cognitive biases while carrying out this sort of research, particularly when it comes time to interpret results.

This recent Aeon article seems to sum up my concerns (I am not affiliated with Aeon or the author of the article in any way):

How natural is numeracy?

https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-humans-have-numbers-are-they-c...

ordu3• 7 years ago

The fact that neither of the two groups trained on the two different tasks (character-to-quantity and quantity-to-character) could generalize their learning to the opposite task also doesn't bode well.

I thought about it, and have found a similar phenomenon in my own experience. English is not my native language, I learned English mostly by reading books in English. I knew a loads of words from a several of authors and could grasp any grammatical construct easily. But I had a big problem with speaking or writing: I couldn't find words to express myself. I know words that means what I want. When I meet words, I could connect them to their meaning easily, but the reverse doesn't work so good. With a practice it becomes easier, but I guess I have to use a word to express myself at least once to master this word to a point, when I could remember it when it is needed.

There is one more detail, maybe unrelated, I have a great troubles when I need translate English into Russian (my native language). I understand an English phrase, but I couldn't find Russian words to match English ones. Though it is an easier task than to find an English word which I know but haven't used before. This task also benefits from practice.

Mind is a complex machine, sometimes two-way associative link could be established only by training this link in both directions.

YeGoblynQueenne3• 7 years ago

> I knew a loads of words from a several of authors and could grasp any grammatical construct easily. But I had a big problem with speaking or writing: I couldn't find words to express myself.

That happens, for sure, but we know that humans can also perform this task well. So that is maybe not such a good example? We know that humans can generalise learning very well, in general.

I mean, just looking at a single person's ability at a task doesn't help us understand the limits of human ability on that task.

jpkane• 7 years ago

These creatures never cease to amaze me.

Bees can link symbols to numbers, study finds

Related Stories