Flying Math: Bees Solve Traveling Salesman Problem

Flying Math: Bees Solve Traveling Salesman Problem: After trying about “20 of the 120 possible routes, the bees were able to select the most efficient path to visit the flowers,” Lihoreau says. “They did not need to compute all the possibilities.” A naïve bee traveled almost 2,000 meters on its first foraging bout among the pentagonal array; by her final trip, she’d reduced that distance to a mere 458 meters.