As a Biology major, and having taking several classes with a nationally recognized neuroscientist with concentration in honeybee brains, articles like this are particularly interesting to me, and I hope to see this study when it comes out.
It is worth noting how rarely news outlets will report correctly on the findings of research - they jump on whatever might make headlines, sometimes even completely contradicting the article in question.
That being said, I think it also inappropriate to say things like What a pile of steaming doo-doo about a study that you haven't read yet. While it is human nature to be skeptical, and yes it might not meet all of the the implications that this news brief summary of an abstract makes, it is important to recognize that there so many things that nature does way better than anything man even comes close to, and that studying the efficiencies of these systems makes for better design and undestanding.
I'm sure the article will be fascinating. I'm also sure the bees don't solve the TSP as computer scientists and mathematicians define it.
As I say elsewhere, hard instances of the TSP are non-trivial to find, especially in 2D. Random instances are almost always trivial. Further, "good" solutions are trivial to find, even when the exact problem is hard.
I'll bet the bees never solved a hard instance (in the technical, algorithmic complexity sense of "hard"). The hype is going to be way overblown.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showForthcomingToc?j...
As a Biology major, and having taking several classes with a nationally recognized neuroscientist with concentration in honeybee brains, articles like this are particularly interesting to me, and I hope to see this study when it comes out.
It is worth noting how rarely news outlets will report correctly on the findings of research - they jump on whatever might make headlines, sometimes even completely contradicting the article in question.
That being said, I think it also inappropriate to say things like What a pile of steaming doo-doo about a study that you haven't read yet. While it is human nature to be skeptical, and yes it might not meet all of the the implications that this news brief summary of an abstract makes, it is important to recognize that there so many things that nature does way better than anything man even comes close to, and that studying the efficiencies of these systems makes for better design and undestanding.