Supercolony trails follow mathematical Steiner tree.An interdisciplinary study of ant colonies that live in several, connected nests has revealed a natural tendency toward networks that require the minimum amount of trail.Researchers studied ‘supercolonies’ of Argentine ants with 500, 1000 or 2000 workers to identify methods for self-organising sensors, robots, computers, and autonomous cars.They put three or four nests of ants in empty, one-metre-wide circular arenas to observe how they went about connecting the nests.As with railway networks, directly connecting each nest to every other nest would allow individual ants to travel most efficiently, but required a large amount of trail to be established.Instead, the ants used central hubs in their networks – an arguably complex design for creatures that University of Sydney biologist Tanya Latty described as having “tiny brains and simple behaviours”.via Ants build cheapest networks – Networking – Technology – News – iTnews.com.au.
Ants do it better…