628083 external_news 1572020018 1572020225 Ants are notoriously much better than humans at organizing their collective traffic flow when foraging for food, but how they manage to do so isn't fully understood...Last year, physicist Daniel Goldman's lab at Georgia Tech studied how fire ants optimize their tunnel digging. Those tunnels are narrow, with barely enough room for two ants to pass, yet jams rarely happened. When an ant encounters a tunnel in which other ants are already working, it retreats to find another tunnel. It also helps that only a fraction of the colony is digging at any given time: 30% of them do 70% of the work.

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