Do ants and PhD students even make good decisions ? A short answer from your local biology lab
by
Louis Devers(IMT)
→
Europe/Paris
Johnson 1R3
Johnson 1R3
Description
It is tempting to believe humanity as a species prevailed because of its capacity to make good decisions. Being smarter intuitively sounds like a requisite to tame one's environment, dangers, fulfil collective nutritional needs and prosper. However one could ask how do we define a good decision or even intelligence ? And is it really necessary to survive ? Taking an example : ants like humans are ubiquitous, as they exhibit an impressive ecological success all over the globe. Although, we would not say that an ant, with only 250,000 neurons against 86 billions for humans, is particularly smart, and yet, they prosper. What would be the sufficient "intelligence" level to prevail then ? And how do they take "good decisions" with this few neurons ?
A known particularity of ants is that they transport relatively heavy things on a regular basis (e.g. food, larvae, soil). As transporting things usually costs a lot of energy, ants success might highly depend on their capacity to take good transportation decisions and not waste energy. In this presentation, I will present my work on the optimality of transportation decision in ants as a maths/physics person in a biology lab (the CBI). We will see how, using maths, physics, and a lot of manual work, we can ask things nicely to ants, measure their decisions, test their fitness, and search for possible cognitive and metabolic explanations.
