80 Ants Beat a Team of 26 Humans at the Piano Movers Puzzle, PNAS Study Finds
aakashgupta · x · 2026-11-13
A PNAS 2025 study from Ofer Feinerman's lab at the Weizmann Institute had 26 masked adults carry a T-shaped object through two narrow doorways in silence—and the group performed worse than one person alone, while a crew of 80 longhorn crazy ants (about 3mm long) succeeded.
The puzzle comes straight from robotics: the classic piano movers problem, formalizing how to maneuver a large object through tight spaces. The team built both ant-scale and human-scale mazes, testing ants in groups of 1, 7, and 80, and humans in groups of 1, 6–9, and 26.
To motivate the ants, researchers left the T-shape in a bag of cat food overnight—so the ants thought they were hauling dinner. No single ant knows a puzzle exists; collective intelligence emerges at the group level.
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