Author: This article is a little boring, so you can skip it and read the next chapter directly.

- I'm the dividing line -

After the ant-larvae in the five nurseries have broken their pupae, the experiment soon enters the final stage: the protagonist needs to go into battle to test the intelligence level of the adult ants.

Outwardly, the adult worker ants in Nursery 2 are most like the large worker ants in parasitic ants, while the worker ants in Nursery 3 are slightly larger than the large worker ants. As for the adult worker ants in the No. 4 and No. 5 nurseries, they have a faint golden color on the body surface, but their body size is almost the same, and they are all like the pale gold worker ants in the parasitic ants.

However, judging by appearance alone is inaccurate, and the protagonists need to verify their intelligence level. And in the protagonist's plan, a high level of intelligence is also their most useful specialty.

For how to judge the level of human intelligence, in the original world of the protagonist, there are already mature standards and various forms, such as the famous "Mensa Club" entrance test.

This kind of test is generally based on the aspects of attention, observation, logical thinking, imagination and memory, and only those who have a converted IQ of 148 are eligible to join.

However, the ants are certainly not able to answer such advanced questions as the Mensa test at the moment. What they need at the moment may be a lower-level intelligence test that is more suitable for animals, and the so-called dog is equivalent to the intelligence level of a human being, and the cat is equivalent to the intelligence level of a human being.

"Intelligence is the result of a high degree of processing of information and a series of phenomena", which is a definition of intelligence. In addition to learning, the ability to use tools and express one's thinking is one of the categories in which intelligence is assessed.

The degree of intelligence of animals (including humans) is not entirely determined by the evolutionary selection of the brain, and its degree of development is determined not by the size of the brain, but by the connections between specific parts of the brain.

"Intelligence" has three broad meanings:

First, it is the ability to adapt to various situations; second, the ability to learn from past experiences; The third is the ability to think abstractly and logically.

The criteria for assessing the intelligence of animals below the human level are diverse, not through a certain IQ test, but through the multi-faceted evaluation of the animal's learning ability, imitation ability, survival skills, etc.

Like what:

1. Experiments on the action of classical conditions. For example, the "conditioned reflex" experiment, which examines whether an animal can respond to a stimulus that it does not respond to through experience, is also called associative learning. For example, if you give a bell stimulus to your dog every time you feed it, the dog will react to the bell after a few times. This shows that dogs have the ability to learn associatively.

In addition, experiments can also prove that the ability of associative learning is also present in flatworms.

Some researchers believe that unicellular animals, such as paramecium, also have the ability to learn by association. Such as paramecium. However, it has also been suggested that paramecium's conditionally responsive behavior may simply be a posterior effect of feeding behavior.

It should be noted here that the average person may think that the speed at which a conditioned response is formed can indicate the height of intelligence, but this is wrong, and the intelligence level of a certain animal cannot be judged by the speed at which a certain conditioned response is formed alone.

2. A test of insight ability. For animals with higher intelligence, there are several experiments that can be compared.

Circuitous route experiments: This experiment is designed to create a barrier (such as barbed wire) between the subject animal and the food that lures it, and the animal must find a way around the obstacle to get the food.

In this experiment, it was found that chickens often ran straight into or walked back and forth in front of the barbed wire that blocked them, and only by chance could they find their way to food. Dogs and chimpanzees can easily see ways around obstacles.

Crossover line problem: This experiment is to put 2~4 ropes together, or parallel or in different ways, and the distal end of one of them is tied with food, and the test animal can choose a rope with food.

Such experiments have shown that monkeys can solve the simpler cross-line problem, and raccoons and rock squirrels can choose between two parallel lines or even crossed lines after learning which line to be tied to food. Neither dogs nor cats can solve this kind of problem.

3. Reverse learning. This is an experiment to test the flexibility of animals, and the main method is to train animals to distinguish between two stimuli, usually two patterns. Approaching or touching one of them gives you food, and approaching or touching the other does not give food, the former is called a positive stimulus, and the latter is called a negative stimulus. When the animal learns to discern the response, the positive and negative stimuli are reversed to observe the speed at which the animal changes the learned response, sometimes repeatedly.

In experiments with repeated inversions, it was found that birds and mammals changed the rate of response (number of exercises), accelerating with the number of repetitions of inversion. After several repetitions, after a trial selection, the discriminating reaction is reversed. The reversal of the spatial discrimination response of the turtle is also relatively easy, but the reversal of the visual discrimination response is unsuccessful. Fish and octopuses also show the ability to reverse discriminatory responses, but they are slower and require more training sessions. This indicates that lower animals have a lower capacity to change their behavior.

4. Master the learning of a certain law. There are several experiments to see if an animal can form a certain "concept" from experience and thus find the right way to solve a problem.

Probabilistic learning: The simpler is spatial discrimination. For example, having an animal choose an object on the left, or going to the left, gives them more chances of getting food, and less chance of getting food by choosing the opposite side. The left-right selection of fish and cockroaches is random, while the left-right selection ratio of turtles, pigeons, rats, and monkeys is similar to the probability of getting food from the left and right.

Parity selection: 3 choices are given to animals, two of which are identical in shape, size, or color, and the other is different from them; 3 objects are randomly arranged, and the animal is trained to choose which one is different from the two. Experiments have found that it is difficult for rats to learn this method of selection. Monkeys are easy to learn.

Learn to set the pattern: Prepare many pairs of objects and give them to the animals to choose one by one. Observe how many pairs of the animal has been practiced and then be able to choose the object with the food reward immediately after changing to a new pair.

In this experiment, the accuracy of the selection of the first pairs is very low. With practice, some animals are considered to have gradually mastered the law of "winning or not changing, and losing and changing".

From the results of this experiment, it can be seen that there is a clear correlation between the speed of completing this learning task and the level of phylogenetic development of the species.

These slightly complicated experiments are what the Lord absolutely needs these experimental ants to test.