Are ants smarter than chimpanzees?

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Despite having such tiny brains, ant mounds are apparently like complex human cities, complete with technology such as plumbing systems:

That depends on your definition.
A single ant most definitely is not, and comparing an ant colony to a single chimp is unfair.

Also, there is a colony of chimps (i think, it might be bonobos or another great ape) that has, reportedly, entered the stone age: making their own "advanced" stone tools.

Many animals do things that appear to show intelligence.

Beavers build dams, and create reservoirs and moats for their little dens. Have hiked trough creek watersheds so splendidly reengineered by beavers that you have thought that the beavers were MIT trained engineers employed by the Tennessee valley authority.

But its all done by instinct. Beavers hate the sound of running water. Put up a speaker broadcasting the recorded sound of running water and the beavers will bury it in mud and sticks, and keep on doing forever until you turn it off and create structures in the process.

But beavers are at least mammals, of medium size with typical nonhuman mammal sized brains.

Tiny cold blooded animals with miniscule brains also do what look like intellectual feats.

Angel fish in the ocean do what amounts to agriculture (they weed out nascent corals that compete with sea weed in their territories so the green seaweed that they eat can thrive like a crop.

Spider webs are quite sophisticated. But they are all done by instinct.

I like to think life works on a sort of biological/genetic algorithm. We're all coded to function a certain way under certain situations, from a single-celled amoeba to a blue whale.

An ant is coded to do what an ant is coded to do. It's built in mathematically, the ant doesn't have to actually think about it. It's great at team work and building in specific ways, and from a general glance that can be mistaken for intelligence. However, can an ant innovate? Has an ant ever developed something new and taught all the other ants how to employ it? Ants do some pretty amazing things, but they're the same things over and over again.

On the other hand, the average chimpanzee probably can't build a complex system of tunnels underground, nor can the average chimpanzee develop a plumbing system within it. However, chimpanzees can do something ants can't do: they can stop and consider things, make decisions when given a set of positive and negative variables, they have emotions and conflicts and develop relationships with others.

Basically what it comes down to is that as far as we know, an ant is an autonomous biological algorithm that may have some amount of self-awareness, whereas a chimpanzee is entirely self-aware and can make decisions for itself rather than those based on a formula. That's what I think, at least.

very interesting about the neo-stone-age chimps or bonobos or apes or whatever. it is like they are also evolving albeit very slowly relative to humans. I like to think some external agent accelerated our evolution for reasons of its own.

Individually no. Ants as individual living things do not have the neurophysiological complexity that chimps and other mammals have. Collectively the Hive is quite smart.

That is the result of collective action.

Now consider sophisticated human brain work. That is also the result of a lot of neurons each of which individually is not intelligent producing a collective result which is intelligent. Same for the ants. Don't think of ants as people with six legs. Think of the ants as neurons of the hive. It is the hive which is intelligent.

If you ask me, I would say the Hive mind is superior to individualized intelligence like our own. We are actively destroying ourselves for singularly selfish reasons. How advanced would ants be if they had our intelligence devoted to the collective?

All of us hooked up, wired up on the internet is an approximation to the "hive mind". Humans tend to work in cooperation rather than solo. So humans benefit to some extent from collective operations. The ants, bees and wasps cannot survive outside the hive. Humans can survive in isolation, but not well and not easily. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that ants, bees, wasps and termites singly do not have a sense of self. They are more like nano-machines that operate interactively with each other. (note, this is only a guess).

Long before the internet, and long before the first written records humans evolved the "hive mind" of culture (something that no human can operate with out). And actually no human can survive in true isolation. Even a hermit in the woods relies on tangible tools made by others to survive, and upon language and other intangible artifacts of culture to survive.

To a degree this is true. This is why people that live in large cities have a better quality of life and a better chance at success. Our cooperation made us successful as a species, but I still believe if we didn't think as individuals and all worked for a common goal like ants we wouldn't have had so many set backs. A collective intelligence would be superior to individuals networking in smaller groups. Just my 2 cents.

A single human with enough knowledge could certainly survive. Though surviving with their sanity intact might be entirely another thing. How long would they want to survive with absolute isolation? The instinct to survive is rather strong as many of us can attest to.

We humans place all sorts of artificial limits on what we can achieve. We constantly undermine each other over personal beliefs, personal gains and biased opinions.

"enough knowledge"?

Exactly! Knowledge of the tools and techniques devised by other humans in order to survive. Exactly my point.

Some people rely on others for information while others innately like to figure out how things work on their own. Someone at some point had to figure out the information before it could be taught to others. Maybe this is my own bias at work. You are correct, not just anyone could do it.

Makes no difference. You wouldnt be conversing with me right now if you didnt know the English language. You didnt invent the English language did you? You didnt invent the Roman alphabet that English is written, nor the 0-9 number system invented in India that the Arabs took to Europe either. Doesnt matter how "self reliant" you think you are you have never done a thing in your life that didnt involve centuries of human cultural input by countless numbers of other people in the past and present.