The use of ideas of Information Theory for studying "language" and intelligence in ants

TL;DR

This paper reviews how Information Theory principles like entropy and complexity can be applied to study ant communication and intelligence, revealing their ability to transfer information, recognize patterns, and perform basic arithmetic.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using Information Theory to analyze biological communication, providing new insights into ant cognition and information transfer mechanisms.

Findings

Ants can transfer information about remote events.

Ants are capable of recognizing regularities and compressing information.

Ants can perform basic addition and subtraction.

Abstract

In this review we integrate results of long term experimental study on ant "language" and intelligence which were fully based on fundamental ideas of Information Theory, such as the Shannon entropy, the Kolmogorov complexity, and the Shannon's equation connecting the length of a message ($l$) and its frequency $(p)$, i.e. $l = - \log p$ for rational communication systems. This approach, new for studying biological communication systems, enabled us to obtain the following important results on ants' communication and intelligence: i) to reveal "distant homing" in ants, that is, their ability to transfer information about remote events; ii) to estimate the rate of information transmission; iii) to reveal that ants are able to grasp regularities and to use them for "compression" of information; iv) to reveal that ants are able to transfer to each other the information about the number of objects; v) to discover that ants can add and subtract small numbers. The obtained results show that Information Theory is not only wonderful mathematical theory, but many its results may be considered as Nature laws.