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The Simple Algorithm That Ants Use to Build Bridges (2018)
Even with no one in charge, army ants work collectively to build bridges out of their bodies. New research reveals the simple rules that lead to such complex group behavior.
Much like the swarms of cheap, dumb robots that I explored in my recent article, army ants manage this coordination with no leader and with minimal cognitive resources. Based on those observations, the researchers have created a model that quantifies ants’ sensitivity to foot traffic and predicts when a colony will bridge an obstacle and when it will decide, in a sense, that it’s better to go around. One challenge they have to contend with is that nature makes ants more reliably, and at lower cost, than humans can fabricate swarm-bots, whose batteries tend to die.
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