From The Morning Paper
The ‘reward equation’ models how ants communicate using pheromones, and our own brains keep track of rewards using dopamine. The reward equation includes a decay or ‘forgetting’ parameter, so what happens if you disrupt established solutions for long enough that their hold is broken?
If you disrupt all of the pheromone trails around their nest, is that they converge on a new solution in the environment, but it won’t necessarily look the same as the one they had before the disruption