Swarm theory

[Tero]

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/ ... iller-text

Enjoy!

[klr]

Excellent.

But if there is a way of rendering it in a single page, I couldn't see it.

[Tero]

Gordon has a theory.

Ants communicate by touch and smell. When one ant bumps into another, it sniffs with its antennae to find out if the other belongs to the same nest and where it has been working. (Ants that work outside the nest smell different from those that stay inside.) Before they leave the nest each day, foragers normally wait for early morning patrollers to return. As patrollers enter the nest, they touch antennae briefly with foragers.

"When a forager has contact with a patroller, it's a stimulus for the forager to go out," Gordon says. "But the forager needs several contacts no more than ten seconds apart before it will go out."

To see how this works, Gordon and her collaborator Michael Greene of the University of Colorado at Denver captured patroller ants as they left a nest one morning. After waiting half an hour, they simulated the ants' return by dropping glass beads into the nest entrance at regular intervals—some coated with patroller scent, some with maintenance worker scent, some with no scent. Only the beads coated with patroller scent stimulated foragers to leave the nest. Their conclusion: Foragers use the rate of their encounters with patrollers to tell if it's safe to go out. (If you bump into patrollers at the right rate, it's time to go foraging. If not, better wait. It might be too windy, or there might be a hungry lizard waiting out there.) Once the ants start foraging and bringing back food, other ants join the effort, depending on the rate at which they encounter returning foragers.

"A forager won't come back until it finds something," Gordon says. "The less food there is, the longer it takes the forager to find it and get back. The more food there is, the faster it comes back. So nobody's deciding whether it's a good day to forage. The collective is, but no particular ant is."

[Elderito]

Tero have you read ‎Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter? One of the characters is an ant colony who freely admits that the ants it is made up of are not smart, but just individual parts of the intelligent colony.

[Tero]

Have not.

Animals have inherited behavior sets. A wasp may store food in mud chambers for its offspring. Sets of these behaviors evolve as a whole in colonial insects, so the set of begaviors is either smart or dumb for its habitat.