There's a classic Charles Stross short story where, to spoil the story, some old men apparently "randomly" playing a board game to pass the time, are performing combinatorial magick to fight a demonically possessed ... well don't want to spoil the entire story. The background of the story is magick is real and based on math and computer logical operations and such. cstross used to post here occasionally and worked as a sysadmin in the olden days.
Anyway, aside from fantasy/sci fi stories, the interesting analogy with the story is just because I'm not smart enough to debug the system given no blueprints or explanation, does not mean an anthill is not running some novel and possibly interesting computational problem. Or bees nest or giant fungal mycelia in the dirt or herds of lobsters.
There are randomness detection and evaluation algos (distantly related to compression algos) and now that we have big data I suspect the next decades will have those algos rubbed up against big data and we'll discover interesting things about hive insects and what the hive is thinking as opposed to what individual insects are thinking. Or run it on dolphins or ancient human dwelling architecture.
