The ant algorithms research field builds on the idea that the study of the behavior of ant colonies or other social insects is interesting for computer scientists, because it provides models of distributed organization that can be used as a source of inspiration for the design of optimization and distributed control algorithms. In this paper we overview this growing research field, giving particular attention to ant colony optimization, the currently most successful example of ant algorithms, as well as to some other promising directions such as ant algorithms inspired by labor division and brood sorting.