Collective Intelligence - Based on the ant's system

Nature has always inspired scientists since time immemorial let it be machines that left the ground and took to the skies a century or so ago or small robots that mimic insect behavior. This is mainly because nature has improved on its design over millions of years and has reached a level of perfection that any humanly devised machine or plan could only dream about.
Take for example the research done on social insects in the last fifty years that has shown the reasons behind an ant choosing the shortest path between its colony and the food source. Another example for such intelligence is in the case of termites building huge termite mounds with hardly any communication. The termite seems to follow a set of simple rules like, they, at first, search at random for a elevated spot, then drop some chewed dirt and keep dropping dirt on the any spot with any saliva on it. The termite does not need global knowledge or any more memory than is necessary to complete the sub-task in hand, it just...