In the most ideal case, this is an exponential growth curve. But "investing" in a new food source, meaning to send out a fraction of the capital to get more revenue, is also risky. There are predators, rain and heat. Would be tough luck on a colony, if they send out half the ants at the same time and then some hungry predator just feeds off the ant street.

So the ants do have some sort of risk management algorithm. I don't know how it works completely, but essentially the decision to send out workers is influenced by the amount of workers in the nest and the frequency of ants coming back with a "profit".

As with any well managed portfolio and a little bit of luck, the growth curve then is exponential, while not exactly crazy, and the end result after a few years is a prosperous colony, having accumulated so much capital, that they don't know how to spend it on growing themselves.

That's when they start to spawn a new generation of ant queens, which is a horrendously wasteful and expensive exercise, but all of these newly mated ant queens, if she survives the first few days, will go into stealth-mode and found her own startup colony.

In this case though, I don't think that resource limits apply that much. Individual ants feed each other, so they can survive quite long periods without food, and they don't grow much beyond carrying capacity. If circumstances change, they can do a "soft landing" by downsizing the colony slowly or even moving the colony.

In fact, colony size seems to be most often limited by burning off excess capital in sexual broods.

Compared with most other insects, ants are actually much worse at building up biomass. But the queen ant's survival is actually safer because the colony manages risk and growth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/magazine/crazy-ants.html

> Soon he and his wife were waking up to find vast, frantic networks of ants zipping around the kitchen floor in all directions. When the picture on their 50-inch box television started flickering, Mike took off the back panel and found the guts throbbing with ants. He got rid of the television.

Outside, dead ants began pooling around the base of the house in heaps so high that they looked like discarded coffee grounds. (It’s common in Texas these days for a person who is shown one of these heaps of dead ants to take several seconds to realize that the solid surface he or she is scanning for ants actually is the ants.) Mike laid out poison, generating more heaps of dead ants. But new ants merely used those dead ants as a bridge over the poison and kept streaming inside.

Ants in Texas are terrible. Off the top of my head --

1. I was stung by a swarm of fire ants when I was ten years old. I had been standing, and hadn't realized that I was standing right on an ant bed. I remember an adult carrying me away, and blinding pain.

2. Ants infested the office of my last job in Texas. Every desk was equipped with an ant motel. One of the water fountains near my desk was completely unusable because of the infestation. All attempts to eradicate the ants failed.

3. At my last apartment in Texas, the ant infestation was so bad that significant numbers of them would crawl up the tires and get in my car. I'd be driving along and realize that there were ants crawling on my hands. I was actually worried that I would take the infestation with me when I moved to the bay area -- but thankfully I haven't seen one since I moved.

I have first hand observed that when a ant pile/mound is damaged (pour water on the mound, spray with ant poison, or just kick the mound), the ants over the next few days will simultaneously rebuild the original structure and relocate the dead ants to a newly build structure. Though I can not recall if the new structure is composed entirely of the dead ants or if dirt is involved as well.

http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml

Here's a video with a demo of ants foraging for food - basically ants are red, food is blue, and pheromones are green: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9liT8epLnAQ

You could "program" individual ant behavior and tweak parameters to see how that impacted the overall behavior (how far do ants go from the nest? How fast do pheromones dissipate? etc).

It's mostly defunct now, but it looks like there is an online version called StarLogo Nova, you see a sample and play with it at http://www.slnova.org/djwendel/projects/2/

The famous short story "Leiningen versus the Ants" describes the scary power of a massive ant infestation.

http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html

Old, but still a novel concept.

It's more combat-oriented than something like SimAnt, but you still have to manage things like food, construction of your anthill, etc.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Ants_(video_game...

Each chapter describes a single mechanism found in biology: e.g., ant foraging, termite nest building, etc. For each such mechanism they first provide an accessible, well-written description of the process from a biological perspective, and then go on to simulate it using numerical analysis and computer simulation.

http://www.amazon.com/Self-Organization-Biological-Systems-P...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ants-Bert-Holldobler/dp/0674040759

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ants-Bert-Holldobler/dp/0674040759

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

Some aspects of our work have been trickling into the mainstream. But if you don't assume that the mechanisms of mind are computations on representations, then it is very difficult to get a job without compromising your principles.

And perhaps you could argue that the mainstream thinks this system of computations is the result of self-organization on some lower level. And I wouldn't disagree. But for the majority of the field that is just lip service. Their research goals are to uncover the algorithms that the mind is running. There's no self-organization at that level.

Of course there are always exceptions. But if anyone is still reading this and is interested I can provide literature staking out the relevant positions.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Society-Mind-Marvin-Minsky/dp/0671...

But, I don't think any approach to consciousness can be considered a large arm of cognitive science. Most cognitive scientists don't want to touch consciousness with a ten-foot pole. But of course you're right that connectionism lives on.

Let me try to explain the kind of self-organization I have in mind. Consider the fundamental question "how is behavior organized"? The behaviorists pointed to organization in the environment. Cognitivists point to organization of internal representations. Connectionists and similar approaches point to organization of neural structures. Yes, something intelligent emerges from simple, perhaps self-organized, components in this scheme. But they are unwilling to take self-organization to the level of behavior.

In my opinion, a true self-organizational approach to behavior is to say that behavior emerges from the interaction between organism and environment. This is the level at which we need to accept self-organization. It is far from the mainstream. The mainstream approach to vision, for example, starts with the retinal image and asks what can be inferred from it. Yes, maybe they say that this inference engine is itself a self-organized structure. But it still reifies an input-process-output view of cognition. The sensory system receives input, constructs a model of the world. The "higher cognitive" centers formulate plans from this model. The action system instantiates these plans.

To bring it back to the ants: The ants demonstrate what can be done without explicit planning. Modern cognitive science studies explicit planning, even if they agree that this capability emerges from simple components.

As I said in the other post, I could provide literature if you are interested in any of these specific debates.

Humans have developed intelligence and culture, which allows us to consciously adapt our behavior over timespans shorter than a generation. Thus we also have developed more adaptable rules that are embedded in culture rather than genes.

That said, both ants and humans arise from the same evolutionary process. Human government is different from, but not any less natural than, ant behaviors.

Though genetic influence is likely more attenuated.

An ant colony is a life-support system for a queen. You're lionising a feudal system, where the life of the commoner is meaningless and dangerous, while the nobility is pampered and insulated. All the commoners are achieving is continued life for the nobility, and they do so frequently at the cost of their own lives. They are entirely disposable.

Similarly, the 'complex structures' that ants build are mind-numbingly simplistic, when compared to the ones humans create.

So what we have is better than the ants in certain ways, because we have an ever-increasing capacity to reprogram behaviors and reason about them without relying on genetic changes; it's going to surface itself as an ugly, inefficient, inequitable, system because we use human judgment to fill in so many gaps, but that's why we also have such a strong incentive to keep automating everything.

Without making a value judgment, I just don't think we're capable of being that kind of drone. We're too conscious of our situation and that of others around us -- with "around us" expanding massively following the advent of print, radio/TV, and now the internet.

Sure, we can model their collective behaviour using simple rules and randomness. Yet this says little about individuals' motivations. Similarly, one can model parts of an economy. Yet a software agent does not have the inner sense of a person. A visiting alien with no comprehension of humans' subjective perspective might well (wrongly) consider our cities as we tend to see ants' colonies; just an artifact of some basic economic rules.