system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does swarm intelligence work? How are ants or bees smarter as a group than an individual?
gpt
Each individual has a very short list of rules.  For an ant, it might read something like, “When outside, look for food.  When you have food, release scent.  If you have no food, follow the scent.”  For any individual, these instinctive behaviors don’t appear very intelligent.  The average ant wanders around at random until he finds food and begins laying a scent trail.  But when you have a thousand of them, those individual behaviors add up so that you have a network of ants running back and forth along scent trails.  At the micro level it is chaos, but at the macro level it looks almost planned. 

There is no single individual responsible for making plans or coordinating the activity.  They have just learned or inherited a set of behaviors that resemble “If/Then/Else” statements.  They are like tiny robots, and each one only makes a very simple decision.  Each individual probably has no idea what the overall goal is.  They just repeat their programmed behavior and the next generation inherits it.  If the behavior was ineffective, they die and that failed strategy does not get passed to the next generation.