Abstract
Most of the literature that uses information-theoretic methods to study animal communications represents the signals emitted by animals as “texts”. This chapter focuses on the conceptually distinct experimental method based on fundamental ideas of information theory, such as the Shannon entropy, the Kolmogorov complexity, and the Shannon’s equation connecting the length of a message l and its frequency of occurrence p, i.e., l = − log p. This approach enabled us to discover a developed symbolic “language” in highly social ant species based on their ability to transfer abstract information about remote events, and to estimate the rate of information transmission. These insects are demonstrated to be able to grasp regularities and to use them for compression of data they communicate to each other.
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Reznikova, Z. (2017). Information-Theoretic Methods for Studying Ant “Language”. In: Studying Animal Languages Without Translation: An Insight from Ants. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44918-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44918-0_5
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