Honeybee democracy
"Honeybees make decisions collectively---and democratically. Every year, faced with the life-or-death problem of choosing and traveling to a new home, honeybees stake everything on a process that includes collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building. In fact, as world-renowned animal behaviorist Thomas Seeley reveals, these incredible insects have much to teach us when it comes to collective wisdom and effective decision making. A remarkable and richly illustrated account of scientific discovery, Honeybee Democracy brings together, for the first time, decades of Seeley's pioneering research to tell the amazing story of house hunting and democratic debate among the honeybees." "In the late spring and early summer, as a bee colony becomes overcrowded, a third of the hive stays behind and rears a new queen, while a swarm of thousands departs with the old queen to produce a daughter colony. Seeley describes how these bees evaluate potential nest sites, advertise their discoveries to one another, engage in open deliberation, choose a final site, and navigate together---as a swirling cloud of bees---to their new home. Seeley investigates how evolution has honed the decision-making methods of honeybees over millions of years, and he considers similarities between the ways that bee swarms and primate brains process information.
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8recommend
16mentions
9people
2019–2026years
88% recommend13% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'll add mine:
Dr. Seely's Honeybee Democracy, which I read in 2022 (during my first GPT-2 experiences). The book discusses basic bee dances, but then expands much further into Seely's own research discovering how simple rulesets allow for the complexity of the supraorganism (i.e. the hive).
The book ends with comparisons between coordinated workerbees as miniature robots, which definitely helped me realize how important K.I.S.S. is, organizationally (whether in life or LLM, "keep it simple stupid").
[•] <https://www.amazon.com/Honeybee-Democracy-Thomas-D-Seeley/dp...>
- I read Dr. Seeley's Honeybee Democracy in 2021, and then again early 2023 (after using ChatGPT). It was my favorite non-fiction read 2021 (Steinbeck's East of Eden for fiction).
The last chapters touch on how simple rulesets can create incredible complexity in the overall supraorganism — it had me thinking of the robots and generative AI that will likely power their micro- & collective- thoughts.
A beautiful book overall, with and without computer comparisons:
[•] <https://www.amazon.com/Honeybee-Democracy-Thomas-D-Seeley/dp...>
- I read a great book Honeybee Democracy by Thomas Dyer Seeley (2010)
Highly recommended for more information on bees and their hives.
- The point behind a cyber defense system that is incorruptible is that it needs to find ways to represent learning mechanisms in an unsupervised manner. The only thing that is really unsupervised (as of state today) is an evolutionary concept, that is why I stuck with ES/HyperNEAT in the past. NEAT as a concept allows to implement flexible adapters for all kinds of things, while also allowing to have a time aware strategy planning neural network (the CPPN) if it's e.g. based on an unfolding LSTM layer(s). The reason why NEAT fits so nicely for this use case is the predictability of results of given tasks, and the possibility to change the neural layer structures based on the tasks and agents, too. So in our case we built e.g. LSTM layers for data structures that need time awareness, while e.g. a bayesian layer makes sense to represent an index map that refers to linked knowledge tree branches.
The previous implementation also featured a custom kademlia DHT which was implemented in a shrinkable and fast-forwardable manner so that the generation of "already outdated solutions to identical problems" could be just skipped ahead directly to the leaves of the knowledge tree to save redundant computation time.
And the only swarm intelligence that is well researched enough to represent a delegated learning mechanism based on bayesian/statistical truths are bee swarms [1] :)
In case you are interested in a project like this, that's basically what we are building @ tholian.network
[1] Check out Honeybee Democracy by Thomas Seeley
- The thorax/wings have a "stroke" limit, and are not repairable after the final instar (i.e. once they begin flying, nothing gets repaired). It's not just flightmiles, any wing usage rolls the lifetime odometer (e.g. fanning, flying, dancing).
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Add Dr. Thomas Seely's "Honeybee Democracy" to your reading list.
And may all your honeyflows remain prosperous.
—Two-hive Beeker
- What I'm most fascinated by is the experiments scientists come up with to learn about bees. A prime example is all the hoops Tom Seeley jumped through to learn how swarming bees pick a new home. He found that they measure the volume of the cavity they move in, they consider how high up the place is, how big the entrance is, and whether bees have lived there before - just to mention a few. He performed his experiments on a "bee-deserted island" (with no honeybee colonies). The icing on the cake is that bees hold a democratic debate & voting as they make a life/death decision. He shared it all in his easy-to-read illustrated book: Honeybee Democracy, highly recommended.
