Without reading the report they refer to, I'll declare in advance ...
What a pile of steaming doo-doo. Give the bees a hard instance of the TSP and watch them flail. Give a computer an instance that the bees "solved" and watch it solve it in less time than it takes a signal to travel from one neuron to another.
Brains are amazing things, bees are amazing critters, but hard instances of NPC problems can't be solved exactly by using these sorts of short-cuts. Soap film gives good solutions, but not necessarily optimal. Simulated annealing gives good solutions, but not necessarily optimal. Randomized shotgun hilll-descending gives good solutions, but not necessarily optimal.
Neural nets, either wetware or software, give good solutions, but not necessarily optimal.
Comments
Without reading the report they refer to, I'll declare in advance ...
What a pile of steaming doo-doo. Give the bees a hard instance of the TSP and watch them flail. Give a computer an instance that the bees "solved" and watch it solve it in less time than it takes a signal to travel from one neuron to another.
Brains are amazing things, bees are amazing critters, but hard instances of NPC problems can't be solved exactly by using these sorts of short-cuts. Soap film gives good solutions, but not necessarily optimal. Simulated annealing gives good solutions, but not necessarily optimal. Randomized shotgun hilll-descending gives good solutions, but not necessarily optimal.
Neural nets, either wetware or software, give good solutions, but not necessarily optimal.