A group of researchers in Milan, Italy, have come up with a few new varieties of evolution and learning.
Ants are the history of social organization and the future of computers.
A colony may contain a million workers and hundreds of queens, and the entire mass of them can build a city while only dimly aware of one another. 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.