Next time you are annoyed by a pesky ant, stop, think, and have some respect. Ants have inspired mathematicians to develop a whole class of computer algorithms designed to solve very difficult real-world problems. In this podcast we talk to Marco Dorigo about ants and so-called ant colony optimisation, and explore the world of complexity theory in one minute.

You can also read the accompanying article:

https://plus.maths.org/content/power-ants

And you can find out more about complexity theory in the following articles:

https://plus.maths.org/content/not-just-matter-time-part-1
https://plus.maths.org/content/travelling-salesman
https://plus.maths.org/content/conversation-stephen-cook-0

The music in this podcast comes from eusa and the track is called "Peaceful Nuclear Explosions". You can find more of eusa's music on soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/eusa

Other sound effects are from Astounded on freesound.org:

https://freesound.org/people/Astounded/