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The Author of this new volume on ant communication demonstrates that information theory is a valuable tool for studying the natural communication of animals. To do so, she pursues a fundamentally new approach to studying animal communication and "linguistic" capacities on the basis of measuring the rate of information transmission and the complexity of transmitted messages.
Animals' communication systems and cognitive abilities have long-since been a topic of particular interest to biologists, psychologists, linguists, and many others, including researchers in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. The main difficulties in the analysis of animal language have to date been predominantly methodological in nature. Addressing this perennial problem, the elaborated experimental paradigm presented here has been applied to ants, and can be extended to other social species of animals that have the need to memorize and relay complex "messages". Accordingly, the method opens exciting new dimensions in the study of natural communications in the wild.
List of contents
Communication, speech and language in human- and non-human animals. The complexity of communication systems and intelligence in animals.- Intelligent communication: can animals exchange meaningful messages?.- Cracking animals codes.- Direct dialogs with animals by means of intermediary languages.- Ants and Bits.- Why bits? Information Theory as a tool for studying natural communication systems.- Why ants? Reliable agents for information transmission.- Ants on the Binary Tree.- The entropy - based approach.- The Kolmogorov Complexity-based approach.- Ants can compress information.- Numerical competence in animals with an insight from ant "language".- Criteria of numerical competence for comparative studies.- Quantitative judgments in animals.- Advanced numerical abilities.- Information Theory as a tool for studying wild arithmetic on the base of their own communications.- An insight from ant "language": flexibility of communication as a basis for arithmetic skills.
About the author
Prof. Dr. Zhanna Reznikova, Novosibirsk State University, Russia Prof. Dr. Boris Ryabko, Novosibirsk State University, Russia
Report
"This short book, which summarizes the work of Reznikova and colleagues since 1979, will be of use to theorists and practitioners. ... we have a collection of experiments undertaken over several decades, bundled with an argument in favor of an unorthodox approach to animal communication." (Stephen Frances Mann, The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 93 (1), March, 2018)
