I’d written an article many years ago on ants but I regret its unlikely I’ll ever trace it again. [Thats why I’m now maintaining a blog where I have a single repository for all these kind of things.]
Why do they walk in a straight line? I read that the first ant that discovers food leaves behind a scent trial, which is picked up by other ants. The ants keep walking over the same trial every time. Almost every ant shortens the trail a minute bit, optimises it a bit, so eventually the curved path ends up becoming a straight line.
This is something I probably wouldnt do now, but as a kid, I would just rub the path between the ants when there was a gap… and see that they would seem to hit some kind of invisible wall and get completely disoriented! But slowly reestablish the connection again.
There are even robotic systems based on ants. Actually if you think about it, each ant is an independent creature with absolutely no “grand plan” about how the anthill (or wherever they stay) should be constructed and how to “build a road” from the anthill to the food source the way we have architects plan our grand flyovers. The ants dont have an organised leader shouting out instructions to the other ants over a microphone, they dont have any of the other hi-tech things we humans would commonly think as inevitable for a similar project for us. And yet their system is just fantastic – every ant seems to know exactly what to do and how to do it, in perfect synchonization with the whole system.
And now that I mention it, maybe its vaguely similar to traffic in Bangalore as well.
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