Ants can swarm over a field and find the choicest food in it as if the swarm were a large compound eye. They weave vegetation together in coordinated parallel rows, and collectively keep their nest at a steady temperature, although not a single ant has ever lived who knows how to regulate temperature. An army of ants too dumb to measure and too blind to see far can rapidly find the shortest route across a very rugged landscape. Ants are a parallel processing machine. Real ants communicate with each other by a chemical system called pheromones.
Ants apply pheromones on each other and on their environment.
These aromatic smells dissipate over time. The odors can also be relayed by a chain of ants picking up a scent and remanufacturing it to pass on to others. Pheromones can be thought of as information broadcasted or communicated within the ant system. Each vant had a meager memory, and could communicate locally. Yet the rewards of doing well were shared by others in a kind of distributed computation.