The Ant Colony, Emergence and Politics
“The weight of all the ants put together is more than the weight of all the people put together”. That is trillions of tiny ants, scrambling around across the planet. Every continent except Antarctica has ants on them, and ants are quite unstoppable as a species. Ants can build extremely complex Ant-Hills with ventilation, farms for agriculture, nurseries, chambers etc. Ants have incredibly organized societies with occupations and departments.
An ant’s brain is the size of a grain of sand and extremely simple. An ant would amount to nothing individually, but as a colony, they can obliterate a patch of forest. Ants don’t have an incredible HR team making their colonies a success, they don’t have team building meetings. Yet an ant colony assigns budgets its ants into workers, farmers, nurses, builders and soldiers in a computationally optimal way. Basically, if a smart person wrote a bunch of code to solve the resource allocation problem for an ant colony, he would not come up with a better distribution, than what ants naturally achieve.
The way ants pull off this problem is incredibly simple yet profound. Imagine Andy the Worker Ant is going on a stroll through his ant-hill. Andy meets another ant, he introduces herself (cause only king/queen ants have a sex/gender, so why not) as Andy the worker, then she says that she is also a worker. Andy is not…
