It is swarm intelligence: How does the system keep finding successful paths in a changing environment? Can we take inspiration from this behavior to create better optimization algorithms?
Why not. I remember a paper which compares the behavior of foraging ants (they send more or less ants according to the rate of returned with food) to adjustment of the window size based on the data rate in TCP.
Simulations are not experiments. It is an animation of a formalized imagination, if you wish.
Simulation can be a very beneficial experiment. See for instance: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5351-searching-for-higgs-boson-...