The optimum strategy to get things done in a team is for most of them not to do any work

Finally good news.

"Ants create networks of narrow underground tunnels by excavating soil bit by bit as a team. To understand the strategies they use, Daniel Goldman at Georgia Tech and his colleagues placed 30 ants into a transparent container filled with soil-like particles made of glass.

For 48 hours, ants created tunnels, entering and exiting them hundreds of times to extend the network. But surprisingly only 30 per cent of the ants did around 70 per cent of the work. “Only a few… would do the majority of the work, with the rest just hanging out trying to avoid clogging up the tunnel,” says Goldman."

Want to learn more from these smart creatures? Of course you do.

Abstract

Groups of interacting active particles, insects, or humans can form clusters that hinder the goals of the collective; therefore, development of robust strategies for control of such clogs is essential, particularly in confined environments. Our biological and robophysical excavation experiments, supported by computational and theoretical models, reveal that digging performance can be robustly optimized within the constraints of narrow tunnels by individual idleness and retreating. Tools from the study of dense particulate ensembles elucidate how idleness reduces the frequency of flow-stopping clogs and how selective retreating reduces cluster dissolution time for the rare clusters that still occur. Our results point to strategies by which dense active matter and swarms can become task capable without sophisticated sensing, planning, and global control of the collective.

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