Is 'rational' than a person?

In a study published July 22 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences researchers at Arizona State University and Princeton University show that ants can handle a more reasonable job than humans - 'superior' animals are intellectual, capable of using tools, walking with their opposite legs and thumbs.

This does not mean that people are not smart by ants. People and other animals often make unreasonable decisions when faced with challenging situations, the study's author Stephen Pratt and Susan Edwards.

Pratt, a professor at ASU's School of Life Sciences at ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said: 'This reverse result is based on one characteristic: most ants themselves know only one option. choose only, and the general selection of the whole group is formed from the interaction between many individual individuals'.

This knowledge of the authors comes from the consideration of the process of selecting ant's nest, Temnothorax curvispinosus.These ant colonies live in small niches, small as a head, and are good at finding new places to live. The challenge for ant colonies is to 'choose' a nest when there are two options with similar benefits.

The authors found that in the form of collective decision making in ant species results will be more accurate because individuals do not have many choices and thus minimize the chance of personal error. This is the method: 'the wisdom of the crowd', Pratt commented.

Pratt said: 'Rationality in this case means that a decision maker to maximize something should be consistent in the ability of each choice to contribute. For example, for animals that try to maximize their physicality, they should put options such as food sources, partners or size according to their ability to contribute to the physicality of those choices. ' .

'This means that it would be unreasonable to choose' A 'on Tuesday and then select' B 'on Wednesday, if the physical contributions of the two options did not change'.

Pratt added: 'We think that there are many options, strategies and methods of individuals that are beneficial, but unreasonable errors often occur when individuals directly compare options.'

Research on how or why unreasonable things can provide insight into cognitive mechanisms, as well as how collective decision making takes place.These insights can be a premise for new methods to develop artificial intelligence.

Pratt explains: 'The idea of ​​synthesizing robots is that individual robots can be quite simple and not too complicated, but you can still achieve complex and logical results from a group of robots. The ability to operate without complex controls is essential in artificial intelligence systems and the idea that individual-level restrictions on reality can help the real group level very useful. "Pratt is a member of the Independent Network Group (HUNT), a project funded by the Naval Research Office (ONR) to develop biological solutions for many issues.

So what is the significance of these findings to the knowledge of human social systems?

Pratt answered: 'This is a difficult thing to say. However, the possibility of some restrictions on personal knowledge can improve the effectiveness of a large and complex group trying to do something collectively '.

The research is funded by Pew Charity.