Ants and Bits

Ants have always been helping people to solve various problems. Everybody remembers how they sorted seeds for Cinderella. For the IT community, ants have helped to show that Information Theory is not only an excellent mathematical theory but that many of its results can be considered laws of Nature. Reciprocally, we helped ants to be distinguished among other “intellectuals” such as counting primates, crows and parrots as one of the smartest species [1, 2]. Our long-term experimental study on ant “language” and intelligence were fully based on fundamental ideas of Information Theory, such as the Shannon entropy, the Kolmogorov complexity, and the Shannon’s equation connecting the length of a message l and its frequency of occurrence p, i.e., l = − log p. This approach enabled us to discover a developed symbolic “language” in highly social ant species based on their ability to transfer the abstract information about remote events and to estimate the rate of information transmission. We also succeeded to reveal important properties of ants’ intelligence. These insects appeared to be able to grasp regularities and to use them for “compression” of data they communicate to each other. They can also transfer to each other the information about the number of objects and can even add and subtract small numbers in order to optimize their messages.