I want an ant farm that comes with bottles of ant pheremones. Then I'd use them to build a Rube Goldberg machine out of ants and make them calculate pi or something.
Edit: somebody should totally apply to YC with this idea. You could even get free publicity by getting PETA on your case.
I don't know that you can calculate pi directly. However, an easier problem to map to with ants is the Traveling Salesman. Then you can map it to all the other NP-complete problems.
I've listened to the podcast and it was a treat. Ed was also able to isolate the chemical that ants lead behind when they're tracing back home from a food source. When he dabbed it at the entrance of an ant colony, they exploded out of the burrow.
For fun, he likes to write his name with the chemical, and the ants will follow it, tracing out his name.
This was covered a while back as part of a RadioLab (http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/) episode. Not sure if this is exactly the same audio or not (didn't have time to listen), but if you haven't already listened to every single RaidoLab show, do so...now...
What? What are you still doing reading this?!? Go listen already...they're mind blowing!
In all seriousness I would imagine every ant carrying each other to the 'dead' pile over and over and over until the smell wore off all the ants and life returned to normal.
Could we combine the 'follow' scent with this and create some sort of elaborate Rube Goldberg ant machine?
I wonder if the ants can talk and have sophisticated societies with large building underground, by they standards anyway and perhaps have universities and stuff, I mean perhaps they like us just different.
Edit: somebody should totally apply to YC with this idea. You could even get free publicity by getting PETA on your case.
Edit 2: Name the company "Insect Overlords".