Scientists in South Yorkshire are attempting to improve artificial intelligence (AI) devices and systems by utilizing the power of bee brains.
With brains the size of a sesame seed, honeybees are thought to be the best at making quick decisions. This is according to University of Sheffield researchers.
The experts looked at how bees select which flowers to visit in search of nectar.
The goal, according to study leader Dr. HaDi MaBouDi, is to create intelligent machines "that can think like bees.".
Twenty bees were taught to recognize five different flower colors as part of the study. Green flowers had bitter tonic water, blue flowers had sugar syrup, and the other colors occasionally had glucose.
The bees were then released into a specially constructed garden with flowers that contained only distilled water to observe their behavior.
According to the experiment, they were just as quick to avoid flowers they believed would not have food as they were to make a beeline for flowers they believed would have food, arriving there in an average of 0 point 6 seconds.
Together with colleagues from Macquarie University in Sydney, Dr. MaBouDi of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield said: "What we've done in this study is reveal the underlying mechanisms which drive these remarkable decision-making capabilities.
"Now that we have these, we can use them to create better, more reliable, and risk-averse robots and autonomous machines that can think like bees, some of the most effective navigators in the natural world. " .
According to scientists, the study will enable designers to modify the results to improve their AI-powered products.
