Thoughts: The Fascinating Intelligence of Bees and Ants

Lately I’ve been reading about bees and ants, and I’ve found them fascinating. As individual creatures, they have relatively small brains (compared to humans) and cannot accomplish much. Yet, as a group, their behaviour is astonishingly complex!

For example, ants colonies are able to build awe inspiring structures, defend their territories, and find food. Bees can locate flowers, build hives and are able to divide work. I found out that this is the result of swarm intelligence.

Here’s a video that captivated me:

Like brains and artificial neural networks, Swarm Intelligence isn’t just limited to biological systems, but can also be artificially reproduced. I’ve found a few examples online already:

What I’m thinking about doing is creating little “ants” with their own artificial neural networks and running it so that their behaviour is modelled on what real ants would do. I could use this datasets like these, for example. I think that their simple behaviour, would eventually give way to complex behaviour as seen in real life. But I don’t know if I’ll have the processing power to simulate this, since you need a lot of individuals for swarm intelligence to work.

Anyway, I’ll research some more about ants and see if that gives me any good ideas to implement in the future. :)