Ant colonies have stimulated many other researchers whose interests include controlling crowds, designing office buildings, sorting data, and pushing large boxes. Consider ants' remarkable cooperation in moving large, heavy objects up steep slopes. Each ant senses imbalances in forces directed at the object by other ants and automatically shifts to reinforce the weak side. The same idea could be applied to robots designed to move bulky containers. In the ant species Leptothorax unifasciatus , researchers have observed that the eggs and the tiniest larvae are in the center of the brood area and progressively larger larvae are farther out.
Worker ants seem to expend considerable effort sorting and consolidating the brood.
Biologists have proposed that an ant picks up and drops an item according to the number of similar items nearby. If an ant is carrying a large larva, it's more likely to drop it off among large larvae. If an unladen ant happens upon a large larva surrounded by eggs, it will zero in on the larva and move it away. Although this model for ant behavior has yet to be validated, computer scientists already have found it useful for data sorting, where artificial ants perform random walks to pick up or drop off data items according to criteria of similarity. In a world where a chip will soon be embedded into every object, from envelopes to trash cans to heads of lettuce, control algorithms will have to be invented to let all these 'dumb' pieces of silicon communicate.