3 min read
Every so often a story lands so perfectly on the nose it feels commissioned by a satirist having a very good week. Here is this one: the Jane Goodall Institute has teamed up with a quantum-computing outfit to work out, using one of the most advanced machines humanity has ever built, why chimpanzees wage brutal war on one another while bonobos mostly just… get along. Anyone who has spent five minutes on the internet this year may feel the primates already answered the question for us, free of charge.
What they are actually doing
Announced on 14 July, which happens to be World Chimpanzee Day (of course it is), the Jane Goodall Institute USA and a firm called FormationQ launched a two-year programme with the gloriously grandiose title “Ecology of War and Peace”. The plan: run a detailed agent-based model called B3GET, built by researchers at the University of Minnesota, on IonQ’s trapped-ion quantum hardware. Virtual primates forage, breed, brawl and cooperate across simulated landscapes, and the quantum machine chews through the combinatorial nightmare faster than a classical computer comfortably can. Basic stuff, apparently, once you have a Nobel laureate on the payroll.
Why a quantum computer and not a big ordinary one
Agent-based models get punishing fast. Every animal reacts to every other animal, the environment shifts underfoot, and the number of possible states balloons into the kind of maths that makes ordinary supercomputers sweat through their heatsinks. This is exactly the high-dimensional, probabilistic territory where quantum approaches are supposed to eventually earn their keep. Whether they genuinely do so here, or whether this is a beautifully wrapped proof-of-concept with a charismatic mascot, is precisely the sort of thing worth watching. Quantum has a long and storied history of dazzling demos that never scale, and an equally long history of the sceptics being made to eat their words. We keep tabs on both over on our quantum computing news hub.
It builds, by the way, on more than six decades of Goodall’s fieldwork at Gombe in Tanzania, which is a lovely reminder that behind all the shiny trapped-ion hardware sits an elderly woman with a notebook who watched chimps for longer than most of these companies have existed. In fairness, that notebook is the actual dataset. The quantum computer is the world’s most expensive calculator strapped to the side of it.
The uncomfortable bit the funders won’t enjoy
The genuinely interesting question under the press release is whether the gap between chimp warfare and bonobo peace comes down to ecology: food abundance, competition, who controls the resources. If it does, the science strongly implies something the people pouring trillions into compute-scarcity might not want to hear. Scarcity breeds violence; abundance breeds chill. We have built an entire economy on the deliberate manufacture of artificial scarcity, and we are now paying for a quantum computer to look surprised at the results. The spice, as ever, must flow.
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Did you know: bonobos and chimpanzees each share about 98.7% of their DNA with us, which makes them equally our closest living relatives. One species defuses tension with food-sharing and enthusiastic, indiscriminate affection (not in a sexual way, get your mind out of the… alright, fine, largely in a sexual way). The other patrols borders and kills its rivals. Evolution handed us both templates, and we appear, collectively, to have picked the wrong role model.