I think the real amazing thing is that the protocols for the internet took brilliant people years to figure out. Ants do it as one self-organizing body, anarchically.
I've always been fascinated by the collective intelligence of an ant colony. This drives it home even more.
Ants had millions of years to evolve the algorithms. And I don't think it qualifies as a collective intelligence, I prefer to view "hive mind" systems as multiple instances of the same object, so the beauty of the ant isn't that it has a massive collective intelligence, or self organizes, but rather that it has a protocol small enough to fit into their tiny brain, but elegant enough to make ants one of the largest bio-mass of all species.
It is a very similar situation to the inside of any organism. You have a bunch of cells, none of which has significant intelligence, but which follow a set of protocols that allows them to work together and form an organism capable of duplication. Or you can look at how a single cell is composed of molecules that follow a set of even simpler protocols that still causes self duplication. Or you can look at how a bunch of atoms came together in such a way that allowed self duplication, and error propagation, until the 'arms race' between these molecules led to the creation of a group of entities who cannot even comprehend how such a system can occur without thinking of the single molecules as being alive.
Personally, I appreciate the mathematical elegance that flowers use to optimize their leaf coverage. (They start with an even arrangement of growth hormone, and then the region that is over crowded has less hormone then the region that is under-crowded, so new leaves grow where they are most needed, resulting in Fibonacci spirals).
Sorry if this post came across as condescending, but I feel that blind awe at the intelligence of nature tends to diminish the mathematical elegance it exploits; I much prefer to view ants as an example of an extremely simple and elegant algorithm that can make use of many stupid entities, as apposed to a massive hive-mind, with access to the brain power of thousands of ants, that still can't do better then the simple algorithm.
Condescending or not, I don't agree. Your view is very reductionist. From what I gather, you are saying that ants can be described by the mathematical formulas of their behavior. This is true for just about any phenomena. It can be described and calculated. The fact that creatures as simple as ants, completely helpless on their own, can do such incredible things when in groups is most certainly worthy of awe. How many people, with all of our intelligence, could program homogeneous robots that are able to burrow into the ground and meet two tunnels underground from either end by only exchanging rudimentary signals with each other? Not may, if any people could do this.
My point is that there is more here than simple math, and it does deserve awe. There is collective intelligence. Ants in a group have an understanding of their surroundings in ways that we cannot comprehend. I tend to view them as neurons of a larger brain. Each neuron receives inputs, processes, and gives an output based on a very simple formula. Put a few hundred million of them together, and you get something that math cannot describe: consciousness. Ants individually are very simple creatures, but en masse are greater than the sum of the parts.
I don't think they are the end all be all of evolution nor do I think their methods particularly apply to us, but I think they are worthy of admiration.
> How many people, with all of our intelligence, could program homogeneous robots that are able to burrow into the ground and meet two tunnels underground from either end by only exchanging rudimentary signals with each other?
If I had been talking about how objects of mass attracted each other (or some similar system), him saying 'gravity' would also serve to provide me with textbooks of information and research that might be relevant to what I was talking about. As it so happens, I was aware of the term 'emergence', but if I was not, then his mentioning it makes it far easier for me to do further research on that thing I described in my first post.
I've always been fascinated by the collective intelligence of an ant colony. This drives it home even more.