Ants Correctly Locate the Zero in a Continuous Series of Numbers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Knowing that the workers of the ant Myrmica sabuleti have a concrete notion of zero, and that they can expect the time and the place of the next delivery of food, we experimentally examined if these ants could locate the zero at its due cardinal place. The ants were visually trained step by step to a continuous decreasing series of two amounts of elements differing by one unit, and of which, at each step, either the lower or the higher amount was associated with food. The ants were tested at each step of the decreasing series, and each time essentially reacted to the amount of elements which would be associated with the following food delivery. This showed that the ants could distinguish amounts of elements as being lesser or higher by one element, up to and including the absence of element (the zero). At the end of the series, the ants perceived the zero as being ‘1 element less 1’ as well as 1 element as being ‘0 element plus 1’. They thus correctly located the zero at its due cardinal place.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".