A Weizmann Institute of Science team has found that ants have better group smarts than people when maneuvering a large load through a maze.

Prof. Ofer Feinerman, who led the research team, said the study showed humans’ cognitive abilities gave them an edge over ants when working individually. However, when ants joined forces and formed groups, they defeated groups of people working together.

The study recently appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tabea Dreye, one of the researchers, created a real-life version of what is known as the “piano movers puzzle,” a robotics problem that examines possible ways of moving an unusually shaped object – a piano, for example – from point A to point B in a complex environment.

Instead of a piano, the ants and people were given a large T-shaped object that they had to maneuver across a rectangular space that was divided into three chambers and connected by two narrow slits.

The researchers created two sets of mazes, one that was ant-sized and one that was human-sized.

Recruiting people to participate in the study was easy, the researchers said. People volunteered because they “probably liked the idea of a competition.”

Ants, however, are not competitive. The researchers said the ants........

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