  Colonies of ants can collectively choose the best of several nests, even when
many of the active ants who organize the move visit only one site.
Understanding such a behavior can help us design efficient distributed decision
making algorithms. Marshall et al. propose a model for house-hunting in
colonies of ant Temnothorax albipennis. Unfortunately, their model does not
achieve optimal decision-making while laboratory experiments show that, in
fact, colonies usually achieve optimality during the house-hunting process. In
this paper, we argue that the model of Marshall et al. can achieve optimality
by including nest size information in their mathematical model. We use lab
results of Pratt et al. to re-define the differential equations of Marshall et
al. Finally, we sketch our strategy for testing the optimality of the new
model.
