The Rest Is Science How Words Shape Your Body
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Mar 5, 2026 A playful look at whether bees can be trained to compute and what animal swarms reveal about computation and consciousness. A lively dive into whether speech patterns and diet subtly shape facial features. A visual thought experiment that reframes human history by adding ten thousand years to our calendar.
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Bees Can Learn Rule-Based Numerical Tasks
- Bees can learn abstract cues like 'add' or 'subtract' and reliably choose the correct option in a Y-maze experiment.
- In 2019 researchers trained bees with colours signalling addition or subtraction and rewarded correct choices with sugar water.
Simple Rules Can Produce Complex Computation
- A Turing machine can perform arithmetic by following simple, local rules without 'understanding' the task.
- Hannah Fry demonstrates addition using a tape of plates with pennies and a blindfolded rule-follower who only moves plates and switches rules.
Writing Symbols Is Essential For Universal Computation
- Bees can follow rules and read states but cannot reliably 'write' persistent symbols, which prevents them becoming full Turing machines.
- Fry argues writing (placing a symbol and returning later) is essential for universal computation and bees lack that mechanism.
