An emergent system is formed by many interactions of many individuals.
That is, you lock in many simple individuals like ants that have simple communication patterns, such as the ten terms that the ants manage; in a space, such as the anthill that they create and modify over time. From something like this we would not expect a different result from the sum of the results of each ant unless a super-ant coordinated them and decided what each one of them should do. But gregarious animals give us surprises.
So when a group of simple animals live together for a while and we reveal their constructions by casting molten aluminum, you get something like this three-dimensional superstructure that gives you an idea that what has happened in there is much more than the sum of the intelligences of the ants.
The persistence over time of communications among many individuals results in a series of conclusions that individuals could not make on their own.
Here is where the temptation arises to think of a queen ant, much smarter than the others and who gives orders to the rest of the anthill; but this hypothesis is only a chimera that biologists have already discarded. Neither the queen ant nor the queen bee do more than lay eggs, they do not give orders to anyone; nor are there centurions, bosses or anything like that.
Ants self-organize just as we do on many occasions, from many one-to-one interactions great things like this come about.
In this case it is a fairly small anthill but it gives us an idea of what can be done. Here you have the video of the process.
