Humans are fascinated by ants. One reason for this is how irritating they can be; an anthill near your home or a swarm of ants at your picnic can create a host of unpleasant problems, from inconveniences to real damage to your food and health. The other reason we’re so fascinated by ants is that they are social animals whose large group interactions may remind us of our own. Individuals working on artificial intelligence have used the concept of ant swarm intelligence in a lot of pioneering works, and algorithms inspired by ants are so prevalent in computer programming that a whole classification of them is known as “ant colony optimization algorithms”. How smart are ants, and what makes them so smart?