An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have
https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2019/10/05/an-ant-colony-has-memories-its-individual-members-dont-have/
Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behavior. People use their brains to remember — but can ant colonies do that too?
This question leads to another question: what is memory? For people, memory is the capacity to recall something that happened in the past. We also ask computers to reproduce past actions – the blending of the idea of the computer as brain and brain as computer has led us to take ‘memory’ to mean something like the information stored on a hard drive.
An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have
Oct 5, 2019, 10:15am UTC
https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2019/10/05/an-ant-colony-has-memories-its-individual-members-dont-have/
> Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behavior. People use their brains to remember — but can ant colonies do that too?
> This question leads to another question: what is memory? For people, memory is the capacity to recall something that happened in the past. We also ask computers to reproduce past actions – the blending of the idea of the computer as brain and brain as computer has led us to take ‘memory’ to mean something like the information stored on a hard drive.