An ant-based computer simulator

Collaboration in nature is often illustrated through the collective behavior of ants. Although entomological studies have shown that certain goals are well-served by this collective behavior, the extent of what such a collaboration can achieve is not immediately clear. We extend past work that has argued that ants are, in principle, able to collectively compute logical circuits, and illustrate through a simulation that indeed such computations can be carried out meaningfully and robustly in situations that involve complex interactions between the ants. � 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.