Artificial intelligence isn’t just large language models or image-generating transformers. Another rich vein of AI is swarm intelligence — lessons from nature on how dumb bugs do smart things collectively. Dumb bugs, each doing a simple task, work together to build bee hives, hornet nests and termite villages. Their collective effort is called the emergent behavior of simple actions. Ants, for example, use chemical communication to find the shortest path between food and their nest. When a scout ant discovers something desirable — say, a Snickers bar — it heads back home, all the while laying down a trail of pheromones, chemicals that trigger behavior in other ants. The other ants pick up this scent and follow it. They reinforce the trail with their own pheromones if they reach the food successfully. At first, ants may explore multiple routes, but shorter paths allow them to make more trips in less time, which means those trails receive pheromone reinforcement more frequently. Over time, the shorter route becomes much stronger in scent and more heavily trafficked, while …