From real ants to artificial ants
Résumé
The social life of ants has fascinated people since ancient times for their courage, wisdom and ability to work. They are even assigned feelings. They are a model of organization. However, when we examine them, we often have the impression that they are restless, go in every direction and have no idea what they are doing. Yet the twig is eventually put into the nest, or the prey is quickly retrieved into the nest. In fact, ants are not programmed automatons, all identical; they are different and they do not do the same things. Thus, in a seemingly chaotic system, an organization remains stable. To explain this phenomenon, the concept of self-organization was devised. Ants became an object of study for computer scientists who model their behavior in order to better understand their social organization. In this chapter, we will first remind what are real ants. Then, we chose to present a few examples of modelling. In a third part, we will see that the ant becomes purely virtual when the computer scientists used the ant model to solve their own problems.