About

Ants vs. Humans: The Maze is a viral video of a colony of ants attempting to maneuver a T-shaped block through a simple maze while a group of humans attempt to do the same thing, with the ants showing more coordination and strategy than humans. The video was uploaded by the Weizmann Institute of Science in late December 2024 and became the subject of memes on Reddit that month after going viral on the /r/interestingasfuck subreddit.

Origin

On December 23rd, 2024, the Weizmann Institute of Science YouTube^[1] page uploaded a video titled "Humans Vs. Ants: The Maze" in which ants are shown attempting to maneuver a T-shaped object out of a simple maze, while humans attempt to do the same thing. The video is part of a study by Prof. Ofer Feinerman's team at the Weizmann Institute of Science to determine whether humans or ants are better at working together to move the object out of a maze. The video gained over 46,000 views in three days.

An article about the study was posted that day to the Weizmann Institute of Science^[2] website. The article claims that humans did better at the challenge when they acted as individuals, but that as a group, ants, in some cases, performed with better cooperation skills. The article reads:

"Unsurprisingly, the cognitive abilities of humans gave them an edge in the individual challenge, in which they resorted to calculated, strategic planning, easily outperforming the ants. In the group challenge, however, the picture was completely different, especially for the larger groups. Not only did groups of ants perform better than individual ants, but in some cases they did better than humans. Groups of ants acted together in a calculated and strategic manner, exhibiting collective memory that helped them persist in a particular direction of motion and avoid repeated mistakes. Humans, on the contrary, failed to significantly improve their performance when acting in groups. When communication between group members was restricted to resemble that of ants, their performance even dropped compared to that of individuals. They tended to opt for “greedy” solutions – which seemed attractive in the short term but were not beneficial in the long term – and, according to the researchers, opted for the lowest common denominator."

On December 25th, a version of the video featuring narration explaining the study was posted by TikToker^[3] @hashem.alghaili and to the /r/interestingasfuck^[4] subreddit by u/Sourcecode12, garnering over 350,000 views on the former and 72,000 upvotes on the latter in a day.

Spread

The video continued to go viral through reposts. For example, on December 25th, 2024, it was posted by X^[5] user @PicturesFoIder, garnering over 40,000 likes in a day. The virality on Reddit was noticed by many users, who began posting memes about seeing it all over the site's homepage.

For example, that day, u/andreandrandr posted a meme to /r/memes^[6] about seeing the video everywhere on Reddit, garnering over 60,000 upvotes in a day. That same day, X^[7] user @yyentaa reposted the video, writing, "they’re installing an iud," garnering over 5,000 likes in a day.

Later that day, u/Foreman120 posted an "everywhere I go" meme about the video to /r/PeterExplainsTheJoke,^[8] garnering over 1,300 upvotes in a day. Later that day, u/Day-Connect posted a "pointing Spider-Man" meme about the video to /r/memes,^[9] garnering over 1,000 upvotes in a day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References