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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The magic that magic numbers do is all too often black. They hold special significance for terrestrial mammals with hands and watches, but they mean nothing to streptococcus or the value of Google.
Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85.
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Instead of rigorously proving his insights in each field, he said he preferred to “stimulate the field by making bold and crazy conjectures” — and then move on before his claims had been verified. This habit earned him some skepticism in mathematical circles.
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A UT Dallas interdisciplinary researcher has launched a human genome analysis project intended to create a mathematical model that improves the efficacy of cancer drugs while reducing their manufacturing costs by as much as 30 percent.
A three-year, $305,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will fund Dr. Mathukumalli “Sagar” Vidyasagar’s development of a new method for detecting DNA sequence similarities.
“What I propose to do is to find mathematical models of how a cross section of cancer patients would react to a particular clinical trial drug,” he said. “If it is likely that an unacceptably high fraction would react adversely, that would allow the developers to kill that program in a timely manner.”
Sagar’s statistical method would reduce the size of the massive databases that store genetic data. With his model, clinicians would be able to sub-sample those databases while still retaining inherent statistical features such as correlations, thus saving time and money without sacrificing accuracy.
This is really interesting. It’s cool to see statistics research in a diverse range of fields, particularly ones such as this that are potentially very beneficial.
Also, “systems biologist” is a really cool title/description.
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