Humans are the smartest creatures on the planet and we’re by far the best at solving all sorts of cognitive tasks. Or are we? In a surprising new study, researchers compared the cooperative abilities of ants and humans using a geometric challenge known as the “piano-movers”. This task involved navigating a T-shaped load through a narrow, maze-like arena, testing the problem-solving strategies of individuals and groups from both species. Remarkably, in some regards, ants showed better ability than humans.

Everyone who’s ever studied ants knows how incredibly well they can cooperate. In this case, researchers selected longhorn crazy ants, which are known to excel in group tasks. They’re called “crazy” ants because they sometimes tend to dash around.

The piano movers problem is a classic geometric puzzle that tests problem-solving skills and cooperation. Participants must maneuver a piano (in this case, a T-shaped load) through a series of chambers connected by narrow slits. This requires careful spatial reasoning and coordination. The challenge essentially revolves around navigating tight spaces, assessing angles, and avoiding obstacles while progressing from the starting chamber to an exit.

Humans took on the puzzle voluntarily. For ants, the load resembled food, motivating them to transport it collectively into their nest. Two similar mazes (one for ants, one for humans) were used.

The ants tackled the problem in three combinations: one single ant, one small group of 7 ants, and one large group of 80 ants. Humans also had to solve the puzzle in three combinations: one single person, one group of 6-9 individuals, and a larger group of 26. To make the comparison more meaningful, in some cases, the groups of humans were instructed to avoid all communication, even wearing surgical masks and sunglasses to hide their mouths and eyes.

In the 1v1 challenge, humans outperformed ants. Single human participants employed their spatial reasoning to navigate the puzzle efficiently, often taking direct paths between key points. This ability to simplify complex problems gave them an edge over ants. But in groups, things were different.

Ant together strong

Ants excelled in scaling their simple strategies to large groups, while humans struggled to leverage their individual cognitive advantages in collective settings.

Groups of ants acted together in a calculated and strategic manner. They exhibited remarkable collective memory that enabled them to avoid repeating mistakes and optimize their strategy.

Humans, on the contrary, didn’t do much better in larger groups. When their communication was restricted (resembling that of the ants), groups of humans fared worse than even a single individual. They favored greedy solutions that seemed good in the short term but were not strategically beneficial

Not only did groups of ants perform better than individual ants, but in some cases they did better than groups of humans.

“An ant colony is actually a family,” says Ofer Feinerman and his team at the Weizmann Institute of Science, one of the study co-authors. “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.

The study reveals divergent evolutionary strategies in cognitive development. Ants have maximized collective capabilities at the expense of individual intelligence, while humans have evolved sophisticated individual cognition but struggle with collective efficiency.

“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,” adds Feinerman.

The experiment opens doors to further research. Expanding the scope to other species could deepen our understanding of collective cognition’s evolutionary roots. Investigating variations in human group dynamics across cultures or task types could yield practical strategies for improving teamwork. Meanwhile, the lessons from the ant groups could inform the design of decentralized robotic systems. Simple, rule-based behaviors might enable efficient cooperation among swarms of robots.

Journal Reference: Tabea Dreyer et al, Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2414274121