Ants and robots

There is a fantastic paper that just came out in PNAS, "Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans" (open access!! link).

💡 You may have seen videos in your recent LinkedIn feed comparing a group of ants and a group of humans attempting to transport a large, irregular item through two narrow openings and a narrow corridor between them, with similar results for both groups. I would encourage you to access the paper, which contains many more videos but also an agent-based simulation of ants, which is used to test hypotheses about the micro-behaviors leading to emergent transport.

For me, it was a sort of blast from the past to see this article, having modeled self-organized collective transport by ants some 25 years ago with Jean-Louis Deneubourg and Guy Theraulaz. Jean-Louis remains the king (though that's not an enviable position in ants) of the study of self-organization in social insects.