“Sounds simple, but it’s not; it’s what’s known as a nondeterministic polynomial-time hard problem—meaning it’s very difficult for humans to achieve. Ants solve this problem routinely. They will always find the shortest possible route to a food source, and as experiments using the Towers of Hanoi Problem set show, if that path is obstructed, they can adapt and find the next shortest route. And so on. They do all this without centralized control and without conscious intent. “In many ways, individual ants are similar to individual neurons in the human brain. The fact that individual ants—let’s
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