WHat happened when you build a single ant that has no vision, only a simple set of rules and behaviours, and then replicate him a few dozen times to make an anthill? Now, place some food nearby and see how well your ant colony finds and retrieves the food.

Some pretty nifty biology and scripting is evident in this video and Second Life experiment by Tectonic Nabob.

Emergent bahviours are a newer study in science. It is difficult to predict what will happen when hundreds or thousands of simple rule-based units interact, but we are learning. It is a brand of science I call "big science" - systems interactions on such a scale that we must actually experiment to see what happens (we can't predict things like we can in chemistry, physics, etc.).

And Second Life is a pretty cool laboratory for such thing. Well done, Tectonic, and thank you for sharing the video!