When to Give Up and Start Over

The Avolio article explains how Chris Reid observed ants solving the Towers of Hanoi maze. When the ants' path was blocked off, they at first attempted to use the original route and found a much longer way around the blockage, but after an hour, they abandoned the first path entirely and managed to find the new optimal route. This idea is somewhat reminiscent of something I mentioned in my last post about how it is difficult to give up on something that one is so deeply invested in. The ants did not have an issue giving up and starting from scratch, but I am confident that humans would. For instance, I can recall doing a corn maze with my family in Vermont once and there were 4 possible routes to take at the very beginning (labeled eenie, meenie, minie, moe). We would choose one path and walk around for close to an hour. At times we questioned whether we took the right path at the beginning, but felt that we were too far down this path to turn around and go back to the beginning (of course, we weren't even confident that we could even find our way back there). We also needed to cross several bridges. We could see one of the bridges, and we passed under it several times. We wasted around a half hour constantly checking every path in the near vicinity trying to find the way to the bridge, when in fact the path necessary was quite far away. Sometimes higher intelligence is a curse!