The Language of Antennae
When two ants meet, they briefly touch antennae. The encounter lasts less than a second. In that fraction of a second, each ant detects:
- Colony membership — is this ant from my nest?
- Current task — what has this ant been doing?
- Recent history — where has this ant been?
- Physiological state — is this ant hungry, injured, alarmed?
All encoded in cuticular hydrocarbons—the waxy molecules coating every ant's exoskeleton.
Information Without Message Passing
Here's what makes ant communication revolutionary: there are no messages.
Ants don't tell each other anything. They simply exist, carrying chemical signatures of their recent activities. When a patroller encounters a predator, she doesn't announce the threat. Her hydrocarbon profile has shifted. Other ants sense something happened.
The information is implicit, embodied, distributed.
Interaction Rates as Computation
Gordon's profound insight: the interaction network performs distributed computation.
No ant computed the foraging conditions. No ant made a decision for the colony. But the colony "decided" based on the aggregate of individual threshold responses.
This is computation without a computer.
The Deep Pattern
Intelligence can be encoded in connection topology rather than individual nodes. The "smart" behavior lives in:
- The pattern of connections between ants
- The rate of interactions
- The chemical gradients across the network
"The ants are not exchanging messages. Each ant is merely sampling its environment, and its environment includes other ants."