Riders on a Swarm :: The Economist

What can ants teach us about how groups of living things function? Quite a lot, actually. With very little cognitive capability, ants provide evidence for how simple rules in a variable space that includes feedback loops can lead to very sophisticated and coordinated activity. Now, ants are not, in some sense, simple at all. Relative to the human brain, that ant brain is very much less capable. But compared to a comparable size of coal, an ant is vastly more complex. It is intriguing to consider how we might make better use of the characteristics revealed in ant functions to meet the demands we have for continuous innovation and improvement in human endeavours.

This Economist article from the past summer is worth dipping into if you'd like to ponder the life of ants without having to risk being swarmed. For seasoned complexity readers, I'm afraid there won't be a whole lot of new things to discover. It's still interesting stuff to think about, though.