Building Bridges, and “Swarm Intelligence” (ant-style)

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If you’ve lived in a place with ants (which is, oh, most of the world), then you’ve seen how ants build “bridges” with their own bodies. (And yeah, if you haven’t, just take a look at the video below)
 It's a pretty amazing thing, and even more so given that ants are, well, not exactly the smartest creatures around.
Mind you, thats “individually smart” — when you put them together you get swarm intelligence, emergent behavior that arises from adherence to a few simple rules.
In this case, it turns out that ants build bridges by following two basic rules
  1. 1. If an ant is walking on top of you, you freeze in place
  2. 2. If the number of ants walking over you dips below a certain rate, you start moving again.
Yeah, there are some details like timeouts, etc, but the rules themselves are pretty simple. The fascinating part is that this also takes into account all sorts of tradeoffs, e.g.
 — number of ants foraging vs “building bridges”
 — where to build bridges, e.g., if there is a shorter path to get across something
and so forth.
It’s fascinating stuff, read the paper Graham et al. for more

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