I spent a long time on holiday in Greece experimenting with ants. You can establish some cool facts pretty easily. In general they wander around aimlessly until they find sugar. Once they find sugar they follow a chemical trail they have left back to the nest, but they also lay an 'I found sugar' trail. Others happen across this trail by chance (the probability of stumbling across a line is much more than stumbling across a point) and then follow it to the sugar, and then reinforce the trail on the way back. However, they do this thing where instead of following the trail perfectly, they periodically shoot off at tangents and then wander back to it. The effect this has is that over time the trail gets less and less windy, until it's pretty much straight back to the nest. No individual ant has any idea of the big picture of the world, they just follow a set of autonomous rules, but the holistic effect is a system which can efficiently find and collect sugar.

tl;dr: ants are awesome.