As a result they don’t always fly by the shortest route, but "airspace modernisation", as it is known, will allow for straighter paths to destinations.

Graham said the Australian navy transits through the Taiwan Strait because it is the shortest route between the East China Sea and South China Sea, and he warned against reading too much into the timing of the latest sailing.

"Transits through the Taiwan Strait shouldn't be controversial, just lawfully going from the East China Sea to the South China Sea via the shortest route."

The researchers gave the system a simple task to complete -- in this case a simplified version of a maze navigation task typically given to animals such as rats and macaques when studying the brain, where it has to combine multiple pieces of information to decide on the shortest route to get to the end point.

“An example and the most obvious one is a fiber optic connection. That’s the shortest route. It’s the safest route. It’s the most economic route,” Netanyahu said after talks with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides.