January 21, 2025 at 1:48 pm

Ants Vs. Humans. Who Would Win In A Contest To Move Large Objects Through A Maze?

by Michael Levanduski

Source: Shutterstock

Humans are the smartest creatures on the planet, right?

While it is clear that we are by far the most intelligent when it comes to complex thinking and many other measurements, there are situations where other animals have us beaten.

Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which tested the ability of humans and ants to move large objects through tight spaces.

This is something both species have to do on a somewhat regular basis. Humans do it when moving furniture, bringing in groceries, and in a way, when driving down the road. Ants, of course, do this type of navigation when bringing food down into their nest, when they transport eggs around, and in a variety of other situations.

So, who was better at it?

The team had both humans and ants try to move a T-shaped object through a maze. Of course, the object was scaled down in size for the ants. The humans were motivated by science and the challenge, the ants wanted to win because they thought they were bringing food back to the nest.

The first test was to have an individual human compete against an individual ant. Not surprisingly, when measured as individuals, humans outperformed the ants.

The experiment was repeated several more times using groups of humans against groups of ants. The ants had anywhere from 7 to 80 members in the group, and the humans had groups of 6-26. To put them on a somewhat level playing field, the humans were not allowed to talk and their use of hand gestures was also limited.

Ants are well-known for functioning as a group, and this was really on display with these experiments.

Source: Ofer Feinerman, Weizmann Institute of Science

The team commented on the ants, saying:

“Large ant groups exhibit emergent persistence, which expands their cognitive toolbox to include short-term memory—a building block of cognition: the memory of the current direction of motion is temporarily stored in the collective ordered state of the transporting ants, analogous to ordered spins in statistical mechanics. Thus, collective memory is an emergent feature rather than an individual trait. Emergent memory allows groups of ants to perform near-deterministic, persistent scanning of the wall, which potentially leads them through shortest paths in search space.”

The ants really seemed to be working together toward the end goal of completing the maze, compared to the humans who often had trouble coordinating and looking at the full maze rather than just the next obstacle. The ants were able to pull the object through more quickly than the humans.

In a statement on the study, Professor Ofer Feinerman commented:

“An ant colony is actually a family. All the ants in the nest are sisters, and they have common interests. It’s a tightly knit society in which cooperation greatly outweighs competition. That’s why an ant colony is sometimes referred to as a super-organism, sort of a living body composed of multiple ‘cells’ that cooperate with one another. Our findings validate this vision. We’ve shown that ants acting as a group are smarter, that for them the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In contrast, forming groups did not expand the cognitive abilities of humans. The famous ‘wisdom of the crowd’ that’s become so popular in the age of social networks didn’t come to the fore in our experiments.”

This study shows that while humans are clearly more intelligent as individuals, the ants have some real advantages when in groups. Also, this is just one skill out of many that can be considered, but the study leaves little doubt that the ants outshine humans when it comes to spatial reasoning as a group.

If you would like to see the study in action, check out this video:

Humans need to step up our game!

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