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Of Ants and Robots
conJunk writes "The BBC has an interesting story about Ants and their leaderless collective behavior. It goes on to describe these cool little robots called U-bots. They have a super-simple instruction set and if you let them loose in a room full of frisbees it looks, to the casual observer, like intelligent and guided work." From the article: "Being small is going to be a problem. So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"
There's a good article on their learning process here.
I work with small autonomous robots who accomplish basic tasks by working together. As a computer engineer I handle both the hardare and software, so I understand how they would appear 'smart' and 'guilded'. The trick is all in the programming, so that they work together to complete the task without proper communication. As long as they can react well enough to their surroundings (by reacting to eachother) and know what task they are to accomplish, it will look like they are working together as a guilded collective when really they're independant and autonomous.
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See Douglas Hofstadter's seminal book for discussion of ant colonies, AI, emergent behaviour, etc. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465 026567/qid=1110055317/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/103-1941748-8383854?v=glance&s=books&n=507846