ABSTRACT
Many of us have been fascinated by the straight line of ants stretching from food sources to
the anthills we found in our gardens. Taking a closer look, we found that this straight line
was made from hundreds of individual, industrious ants, each behaving energetically. If
we next focus on an individual ant’s behavior (from a modeling perspective, looking at
the individual elements of a system is often called the micro view), it is very easy to inter-
pret the behavior of the individual as unfocused and chaotic, and it is certainly very diffi-
cult to interpret its behavior as being purposeful when taken in isolation. It is only when we
take a step back and look at the behavior of the entire group (called the macro view) that
we can observe a purposeful global system of behavior. This purpose, bringing food back
to the anthill, emerges from the total of the individual behaviors and interactions of the
apparently undirected individual. Somehow, the sum of the local interactions of each
individual-responding only to their local environment-produces a stable, surviving
system, even though individual ants get lost or die.
