Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 0912.4649

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

Boris Ryabko·Zhanna Reznikova
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

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.

Explore related subjects

cs.ITcs.AImath.ITnlin.AO

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Boris Ryabko, Zhanna Reznikova. 2009-12-23. The use of ideas of Information Theory for studying "language" and intelligence in ants. https://doi.org/10.3390/e11040836

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Fundamental Scaling Laws of Covert Communication in the Presence of Block Fading

Covert communication is the undetected transmission of sensitive information over a communication channel. In wireless communication systems, channel impairments such as signal fading present challenges in the effective implementation and analysis of covert communication systems. This paper generalizes early work in the covert communication field by considering asymptotic results for the number of bits that can be covertly transmitted in $n$ channel uses on a block fading channel. Critical to the investigation is characterizing the performance of optimal detectors at the adversary. Matching achievable and converse results are presented.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

Sequence Reconstruction over the Deletion Channel

In this paper, we consider the Levenshtein's sequence reconstruction problem in the case where the transmitted codeword is chosen from $\{0,1\}^n$ and the channel can delete up to $t$ symbols from the transmitted codeword. We determine the minimum number of channel outputs (assuming that they are distinct) required to reconstruct a list of size $\ell-1$ of candidate sequences, one of which corresponds to the original transmitted sequence. More specifically, we determine the maximum possible size of the intersection of $\ell \geq 3$ deletion balls of radius $t$ centered at $x_1, x_2, \dots, x_{\ell}$, where $x_i \in \{0,1\}^n$ for all $i \in \{1,2,\dots,\ell\}$ and $x_i \neq x_j$ for $i \neq j$, with $ n \geq t+\ell-1$ and $t \geq 1$.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2026

A generalization of the map $χ$

The mapping $ χ_n:\mathbb{F}_2^n \to \mathbb{F}_2^n$ defined by $y=χ_n(x)$ with $y_i = x_i + x_{i+1}x_{i+2} + x_{i+2}$, where the indices are computed modulo $n$, has been widely studied for its application in lightweight cryptography. In this paper, we generalize this mapping and completely characterize all these shift-invariant permutations of the form $y_i=x_{i+u}+x_{i+v}(x_{i+w}+a_i)$, where $0\le u, v, w<n$ and $a_i\in \mathbb{F}_2$, $1\le i\le n$.

cs.IT↗