For your amusement, a quote regarding fictional-computing from Hogfather (1998) by Terry Pratchett:
> "That is the long-term storage, Archchancellor."
> "And how does that work?"
> "Er ... well, if you think of memory as a series of little shelves or, or, or holes, Archchancellor, in which you can put things, well, we found a way of making a sort of memory which, er, interfaces neatly with the ants, in fact, but more importantly can expand its size depending on how much we give it to remember and, er, is possibly a bit slow but----"
> "It's a very loud buzzing," said the Dean. "Is it going wrong?"
> "No, that shows it's working," said Ponder. "It's, er, beehives."
> He coughed.
> "Different types of pollen, different thicknesses of honey, placement of the eggs ... It's actually amazing how much information you can store on one honeycomb."
> He looked at their faces. "And it's very secure because anyone trying to tamper with it will get stung to death and Adrian believes that when we shut it down in the summer holidays we should get a nice lot of honey, too." He coughed again. "For our ... sand ... wiches," he said.
Maybe I missed it, but did the article completely neglect to actually describe what kind of arithmetic the bees were doing beyond a basic mention of addition and subtraction? How large were the numbers? What was the success rate? Am I expecting too much from PBS?
they can only increment or decrement a number by 1 ("honeybees were able to use color as a symbolic representation of the addition and subtraction signs and learned, during 100 appetitive-aversive trials, to thus add or subtract one element from different samples. ")
The paper is fairly readable even outside the area of expertise. It's straightforward behavioral work.
Amusingly they used sugar as the positive reward and quinine as the negative reward. I quite like the taste of quinine...
Seems plausible that the bees were able to associate the colors with "many" or "few" rather than (N+/-1). Seems like if they were able to make that general association they would do better than chance, but still fail often.
Which could explain why the effect is fairly weak.
Would be interesting to see if the bees success rate at addition was proportional to the starting value (ex. 1+1 has higher failure rate that 3+1)
> "That is the long-term storage, Archchancellor."
> "And how does that work?"
> "Er ... well, if you think of memory as a series of little shelves or, or, or holes, Archchancellor, in which you can put things, well, we found a way of making a sort of memory which, er, interfaces neatly with the ants, in fact, but more importantly can expand its size depending on how much we give it to remember and, er, is possibly a bit slow but----"
> "It's a very loud buzzing," said the Dean. "Is it going wrong?"
> "No, that shows it's working," said Ponder. "It's, er, beehives."
> He coughed.
> "Different types of pollen, different thicknesses of honey, placement of the eggs ... It's actually amazing how much information you can store on one honeycomb."
> He looked at their faces. "And it's very secure because anyone trying to tamper with it will get stung to death and Adrian believes that when we shut it down in the summer holidays we should get a nice lot of honey, too." He coughed again. "For our ... sand ... wiches," he said.