The Way of the Locust: Reflections on the Nature of Intelligence and Information

The American locust -- unrelated to the short-horned grasshopper that shares a name and plagued the hard-hearted Pharaoh -- is a variety of cicada and is distinguished by the odd habit of disappearing underground and emerging only once in a prime number of years: seven years, seventeen years, nineteen years. Wait a minute -- a prime number of years? At first (or second) glance, this is as an odd as the idea of only emerging during years when a Democrat is in the White House or skinny ties are in. After all, humans made prime numbers, didn't they?

No one is saying that locust can factor a number or even know what a 'number' means. Even taking culture as an indicator of intellect (a dangerous exercise when one's own species invented Greg the Bunny), the locust's music is (literally) monotonous and it has not yet invented theatre. And yet it can apparently distinguish between forty-three and forty-nine as aptly as Sack's famous 'Prime Twins.'

The key to this parlor trick of animal kingdom is survival. Suppose that we seeded a plant with one-year locusts, two- year locusts, and so on up to one-hundred-year locusts. A twelve-year locust who emerges in synch with the factors of twelve- one-year, two-year, three-year, four-year, and six year locusts -- will always emerge in synch with them, and have to share resources with them. A thirteen-year locust, however, will only occasionally have to share with every cycle less than thirteen years, having none of them (except for one) as a factor. Thus thirteen is a better strategy than twelve, nineteen is better than eighteen. For the same reason, every small number, prime or not, are a bad strategy: they will suffer from all the poor strategists who have chosen a number that is a multiple of their number. Finally, unnecessarily large numbers -- the one hundred and three-year locust -- will suffer for their unnecessary extravagance, unable to breed fast enough at this intermittent schedule to establish a foothold. Thus ensemble of locusts spells out a seemingly meaningful message to us fellow devices of the mathematical realm, only they've arrived at the message via resonance and feedback cycles, not real analysis.

Intelligence -- the ability to utilize information to synthesize new information or ideas -- is obviously a subject of intense interest. Are some people more intelligent than other? Can you measure intelligence? Is it meaningful to rank other species in terms of their intelligences? The locust counting off prime numbers, or the hexagon-loving honeybee, or even the chimpanzee washing its vegetable in a stream should make us question what we mean when we ask whether the actor 'knows' what is being acted. A scientist can plot a fractal and perhaps not know that it is beautiful; an artist can draw inspiration and beauty. And of course a man can learn both science and art, using them to reinforce each other and not to oppose.

A ridiculously short program, played out on a digital computer or even a mechanical one constructed of metal or wood, can rattle off prime numbers for as long as you'd like it -- but we'd probably say it 'understands' them no better than the locust. A human being or a launching device can calculate a trajectory and throw a projectile such that it will strike a target: does either of them 'understand' what it has just done, why tightening those muscles or adjusting that azimuth created the initial conditions that would lead to an impact event in the future? Again, probably not.

We are repeatedly reminded that while we may possess something called intelligence, we frequently -- like the locust -- arrive at our decisions based on far simpler, if less efficient, means.