mem·o·ry·less·ness

Bees solve the Traveling Salesman Problem everyday.

The TSP is heavily used in theoretical compute science and in operations research, and is classified as a NP-hard problem.

In its original formulation, the solver is given a list of cities, and their pairwise distances, and is then tasked with finding the shortest possible distance that will allow them to visit each of the cities exactly once.

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“Foraging bees solve traveling salesman problems every day. They visit flowers at multiple locations and, because bees use lots of energy to fly, they find a route which keeps flying to a minimum,” explains Dr Nigel Raine.

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“Despite their tiny brains bees are capable of extraordinary feats of behavior. We need to understand how they can solve the Traveling Salesman Problem without a computer. What short-cuts do they use?” Raine says.

The new investigation could have significant implications for agriculture, because bee pollination patterns are critically important for next year’s crops.

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