The behaviour of ants looking for the shortest route to hoard food in their nest has helped a Maltese software engineer determine potential suicide patterns among human beings.

Ants usually wander around randomly but when they find food they return to their colony, leaving behind them a chemical trail known as pheromone.

When other ants find this path, they stop their random wandering and follow the trail, reinforcing it.

These trails evaporate as the longer an ant takes to travel down the path, the more time the pheromones have to evaporate.

This means that the least time-consuming trail is the strongest and most attractive, so most of the ants end up taking one path.

Ants even stack their dead in piles systematically

Experts have studied these trails and created a virtual replica with simulated ants mimicking this behaviour and walking around a graph representing the problem.

Variables like time, date, shape and colour are inserted on this computerised system to find the best solution.

The method  known as ant colony optimisation algorithm  has been used to help travelling salesmen who have a list of cities to visit take the shortest possible route. Among other things it is used to determine how people would decide in a yes or no issue.

But Jan Chircop, 34, has for the past 10 years on a part-time basis adapted this system to solve more complicated problems.

The algorithm that he came up with can take a much larger number of variables.

It can be applied, for example, by a shipping company which loads pellets on trailers to transport them between ports. By inputting the variables such as time and place, the managers will be able to better use their time and sources.

Ants finding the shortest path between two points was the main focus of Jan Chircop’s study.

Jan Chircop. Photo: Chris Sant Fournier

Through his PhD with Aston University in Birmingham, Dr Chircop applied statistics of people receiving mental health treatment to analyse whether they were at low, medium or high risk of committing suicide.

Genetic traits, life experiences and other symptoms are inputted within the system as the variables, rather than physical locations or dates.

This means that this algorithm could help practitioners determine whether the treatment their patients were undergoing was successful and whether they needed an alternative cure.

“My original idea was to study the interaction of ants and the evolution of their communication,” Dr Chircop said.

“The behaviour of ants is quite curious, and they even stack their dead in piles systematically, without top-level coordination.

“Ants are intrinsically self-sacrificing and selfless and even clutch on to each other to create bridges and rafts to travel when there is no sound ground.”

Dr Chircop now wants to explore sponsorships that could help him develop this academic study within the industry. He can be contacted on janchircop@gmail.com.