Educational Research

Abstract

The Shannon entropy, the Kolmogorov complexity, and the Shannon's equation connecting the length of a message (l) and its frequency (p), for rational communication systems—all of which were fully based on fundamental ideas of Information Theory—are all incorporated into the findings of our long-term experimental study on the "language" and intelligence of ants in this review. The following significant findings regarding the intelligence and communication of ants were made possible by this strategy: i) to demonstrate ants' "distant homing," or their capacity to transmit information about distant events; ii) to estimate the transmission rate of information; iii) to demonstrate that ants can recognize regularities and use them for information "compression "iv) to uncover that insects can move to one another the data about the quantity of articles; (v) to learn that ants can add and subtract relatively small amounts. The outcomes demonstrate that information theory is not only a superior mathematical theory but also that many of its outcomes are comparable to natural laws.

Keywords

Shannon theory, Entropy, Kolmogorov complexity, Language, Animal communication and cognition

INTRODUCTION

Ethologists, psychologists, linguists, and specialists in artificial intelligence and robotics are particularly interested in the animal communication systems and cognitive abilities that are associated with them.The natural idea that the complexity of communication should be connected with high levels of sociality, cognition, and cooperation in animal societies is the foundation upon which attempts to address the question of whether highly intelligent and social species can exchange meaningful messages. In the 1960s and 1970s, elegant but ambiguous experiments were carried out in which animals were required to communicate with one another about a few pieces of information. A group of chimpanzees living in an enclosure searched for hidden food in Menzel's experiments.Menzel suggested that chimpanzees have a way to transmit information about objects' properties and location, but how they did this is still a mystery. Dolphins' cooperative behavior, which may involve intelligent communication, was the subject of other experiments .Two dolphins had to press the paddles in the right order for them to catch a fish because they were separated by an opaque barrier. Researchers were able to conclude, based on the findings, that the dolphins probably use acoustic signals to coordinate their actions. The existence of developed "languages" in non-human beings has remained a mystery despite these supportive experiments that demonstrated that highly social intelligent species actually have what it takes to "say" to one another.

DISCUSSION

The analysis of animal "languages" appears to be plagued by methodological issues. By searching for "letters" and "words" and compiling "dictionaries," numerous researchers have attempted to directly decipher animal language. For a summary, see. However, to date, only two instances of natural communications have been decoded. First, the honey bees symbolic "Dance language" is one of the most complex natural "languages" that have been discovered. It was discovered by (K. Von Frisch et al., 2014), and it was then extensively studied using robotics and radars.The second example of successfully deciphering multiple natural signals was the alarm calls of vervet monkeys, which appeared to communicate with eagles, snakes, and leopards in various ways. Several additional species' "semantic" alarm and food calls were later described; For a more in-depth look, see. It does not appear that other animals do not have "languages," but rather that sufficient methods are lacking, given that researchers have only been able to compile such "dictionaries" for a small number of species. Expressive and distinctive signals correspond to repeatable and frequently occurring situations in the life context of animals in both cases of communications that were partially accessible to researchers. As a result, these signals can serve as "keys" for decoding their signals(Frisch et al., 2014).

However, it is essential to keep in mind that this method of communicating with animals is based on languages that humans have adopted. Surprisingly little is known about the species' natural communication systems from languagetraining experiments. As a result, researchers studying animal language behavior have been confronted with the difficult challenge of resolving the conflict between their knowledge of some species' significant "linguistic" and cognitive potential and their inability to decipher their natural codes (K. Von et al., 2014).

Based on ideas from Information Theory, we have proposed a mostly novel experimental paradigm. Our method's primary objective is not to decipher signals but rather to measure the amount of time animals spend sending messages of varying lengths and complexity to learn more about the information transfer process itself. This method was used to study communication in species of highly social ants, revealing fundamental characteristics of ant "language" and estimating their cognitive abilities (Robert et al., 2012).

Our method's experimental paradigm is straightforward .We only need to create a circumstance in which ants must exchange a certain amount of information with one another. The fact that we precisely know the amount of information that needs to be transferred is the central concept of the initial experiment scheme (Kim et al., 2005). A unique maze known as a "binary tree" has been utilized to organize the process of information transfer between ants. The number and sequence of turns made toward the goal correspond to the amount of information to be transferred. Ants were required to transfer branch number information in comblike "counting mazes" in another set of experiments(Marsh et al., 2008).

For the first time, it has been shown that group-retrieving Formica species can send meaningful messages and have distant homing. We were also able to study important aspects of ants' cognitive abilities, including their capacity to comprehend regularities, utilize them for information coding and "compression," and add and subtract small numbers to improve their messages.

The obtained results demonstrate the capabilities of Information Theory for studying social animal intelligence and communication. The rate of information transmission and the potential adaptability of communication systems are two important aspects of animal communication that can now be studied in depth thanks to this new experimental paradigm. In addition, we were able to successfully investigate a number of significant aspects of ants' intelligence, including their capacity to comprehend regularities and make use of them to optimize their messages (George sheethal et al., 2009).

RESULTS

Except for information contact with the scout, all experiments were designed to eliminate all potential cues that could assist the ants in finding the food. When the scout was in the nest or on the arena making contact with its group, the experimental setup was replaced with the same one to avoid using an odor track. The fresh maze's troughs only contained water to ward off the syrup smell's potential influence. The group was given the food right away if they got to the right leaf of the binary tree. Before the scout could get its group of foragers together, it had to make up to four trips. After the scout's first trip, most team members had already left the nest and were waiting for its return in the arena. Getting back to the gathering, the scout reached one to four foragers thusly, in some cases two of them all the while. Numerous antennal movements occurred after contacts. Because the experiments were intended to investigate the characteristics of distant homing, the foragers were left alone to search for food after the scout contacted its team. The following section will provide a more in-depth explanation of this procedure. In this context, it is essential to note that the working team composition remained constant in each colony over a period of several days to several weeks, i.e., when a particular scout was actively working. It is interesting to note that not all of the scouts in both F. polyctena and F. sanguinea were able to memorize the path to the correct leaf of the maze even after passing their "final exams" during the run-up trials. As the task became more difficult, fewer scouts were able to successfully memorize the path. All active scouts and their groups (up to 15 per colony) were successful with two forks, whereas with six forks, only one or two were successful.

CONCLUSION

The distance from i to the closest "special" branch and the amount of time it took to transmit information about the trough on branch i were used to calculate the coefficient of correlation in order to statistically verify this.The findings confirmed the hypothesis that when a branch is closer to one of the "special" ones, it takes less time to send a message about its number.In order to accomplish this, the data that were collected during the third phase of the experiment were transformed into the format that is depicted in , where one year's worth of data are used as an illustration. What about ants' capacity for small-number addition and subtraction?The ants' transmission of information over a longer period of time raises the possibility that the scouts' messages consisted of two parts at the third stage of the experiment:the data on which of the "special" branches was closest to the branch with the trough, as well as the data on how many branches separate a particular "special" branch from the branch with the trough.To put it another way, it's likely that the ants passed the "name" of the "special" branch that was closest to the branch with the trough, followed by the number that needed to be added or subtracted to find the branch with the trough.Because ant teams went straight to the "correct" branch, we can say that they did the "mental" operation—such as subtracting or adding—correctly.

We believe that species of ants that are highly social and hunt in groups can add and subtract small numbers. Additionally, this suggests that these insects have a highly adaptable communication system. The ants were "encoding" each number (i) of a branch with a message of length proportional to i until the frequencies with which the food was placed on various branches began to show regularities, which suggests unitary coding. Resulting changes of code in light of unique normalities in the frequencies are in accordance with a fundamental data hypothetical rule that in an effective correspondence framework the recurrence of purpose of a message and the length of that message are connected.

Acknowledgement

None

Conflict of Interest

None