Bumblebees and the Traveling Salesman Problem
Link to article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/bumblebee-traveling-salesman/
This article describes how Bumblebees have seemingly solved the infamous traveling salesmen problem, the task of finding the shortest path in a weighted graph. Currently, the amount of time that it would take to solve this problem in the worst case is proportional to the factorial of the number of nodes on the graph. This is why it is interesting that in every case observed, the bumblebees have already determined the shortest path in a relatively small number of tries. Through the use of tiny tracking devices attached to the bees, scientists conducting a study to see how this feat was accomplished, hoping to gain some insight into both the bee brain, and the traveling salesman problem. The results of the study showed that unfortunately, it was only a brute force (trial and error) strategy that the bees employed, but through utilization of their vast numbers, they could manage the feat.
This was interesting to me, because Google maps every day tries to solve the traveling salesman problem, yet we have been traveling long enough that surely the shortest path for every potential path would have been recorded. But in the bumblebee world, it is simply finding the shortest distance that will result in the shortest time. In the human world, the simple graph now turns into a game, where depending on what the other humans are doing, the shortest distance may no longer be the shortest time, and visa versa. This idea directly relates to the concepts described in chapter 8, where distance may become a side thought when determining the shortest time it would take to get from city A to city B, depending on what everybody else is doing.