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The ants and the pheromones | the morning paper

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TLDR; this is the last edition of The Morning Paper for now. Plus: one strand of research you won’t want to miss! I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 podcast recently (More or Less: Behind the Stats – Ants and Algorithms) in which the host Tim Harford is interviewing David Sumpter about his recent book, ‘The ten equations that rule the world.’ One of those equations, the ‘reward equation’ models how ants communicate using pheromones, and our own brains keep track of rewards using dopamine. About 4 and a half minutes into the podcast Tim asks a fascinating question: the reward equation includes a decay or ‘forgetting’ parameter, so what happens if you disrupt established solutions for long enough that their hold is broken? For example, the complete disruption to our established routines that Covid has caused over the last year? The answer for ants, if you disrupt all of the pheromone trails around their nest, is that they converge on a new solution in the environment, but it won’t necessar

TLDR; this is the last edition of The Morning Paper for now. Plus: one strand of research you won’t want to miss! I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 podcast recently ( More or Less: Behind the Stats – Ants and Algorithms ) in which the host Tim Harford is interviewing David Sumpter about his recent book, ‘ The ten equations that rule the world .’ One of those equations, the ‘reward equation’ models how ants communicate using pheromones, and our own brains keep track of rewards using dopamine. About 4 and a half minutes into the podcast Tim asks a fascinating question: the reward equation include

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