A Mind of Their Own Artificial intelligence software enables animators to create detailed crowds filled with characters that can react autonomously to one another. Lucas is terrified. The boy has water-bombed an ant colony. Now, he's being hauled before the Ant Queen. Pointing and nodding, some 2,000 angry ants watch closely, flexing their mandibles and twitching their antennae. Still others are shaking their heads and chatting among themselves until a loud gong brings them to silence. Creating such a detailed crowd scene in "The Ant Bully," a computer-animated film that opens today, once would have been too painstaking and costly. But thanks to artificial intelligence software, a single "brain" was created, allowing the ants to react autonomously to one another and their surroundings. "The ants came out looking so real it was almost creepy," said Mark Thielen, crowd animation supervisor for the film at DNA Productions Inc. in Irving, Texas, one of the producers. Sparked by the popularity of computer-animated movies, Hollywood is looking for new ways to stretch the art form's boundaries. So producers are using something that Walt Disney himself could have scarcely imagined: technology with the ability to create lifelike animated characters whose actions are guided by computers emulating human reasoning through artificial intelligence. Known as Massive, the software is the brainchild of New Zealand computer graphics guru Stephen Regelous, who helped create the spectacular battle scenes featured in director Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Massive has since been used in such films as "King