Abstract
Decision-making is an essential attribute of any intelligent agent or group. Natural systems are known to converge to optimal strategies through at least two distinct mechanisms: collective decision-making via imitation of others, and individual trial-and-error. This paper establishes an equivalence between these two paradigms by drawing from the well-established collective decision-making model of nest-hunting in swarms of honey bees. We show that the emergent distributed cognition (sometimes referred to as the \(\textit\{hive mind\}\)) arising from individual bees following simple, local imitation-based rules is that of a single online reinforcement learning (RL) agent interacting with many parallel environments. The update rule through which this macro-agent learns is a bandit algorithm that we coin \(\textit\{Maynard-Cross Learning\}\). Our analysis implies that a group of cognition-limited organisms can be equivalent to a more complex, reinforcement-enabled entity, substantiating