
Ant colony simulator - caustic
http://www.not-equal.eu/myrmedrome/main_en.html
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charlief
A more piecemeal simulation released by Maxis back in 1991. Possibly some
inspirations (red ants vs black ants, food represented in green
circles/spheres):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimAnt>

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amackera
Should also mention that SimAnt is _awesome_.

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harisenbon
Should also second the mention that SimAnt is _awesome_.

I wasted many many of my childhood days playing that game, and feeling the
rush everytime my hoard of ants took down a huge freaking spider.

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patio11
That "revenge is _mine_ " feeling is one of my favorite parts of RPGs.

"What's the matter, horde of orcs? You beat me twelve times when I was level
four, why are you scared of me now? Could it be _fireball_? Oh I see it could.
And what is this little stick I'm carrying? Still a nonmagical quarterstaff?
Oh, wait, dropped that when I picked up the Wand of Lightning Bolt."

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jacques_chester
A good book exploring simple computational models of complex systems with
emergent behaviour is _Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams_ by Michael Resnick.

[http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=5368)

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arctangent
Coincidentally, I mentioned this recently in response to a thread about how
traffic jams form: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2295135>

I picked up the book over ten years ago and it has had a huge influence on the
way I think about things.

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cma
Pick up Thomas Schelling's Micro Motives and Macro Behavior; he originated
many of these models (the most mind-blowing to me was that a small segregation
preference among individuals balloons into way more segregation than was
desired just because of physical constraints inherent in the geometry of
neighborhoods).

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jacques_chester
It's in my back log.

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fmw
This reminds me of Rich Hickey's Clojure Concurrency talk[1], where he uses a
simulation of an ant colony to explain Clojure's concurrency features.
Hickey's version[2] is a lot simpler, but remains an interesting starting
point if you want to hack on something similar.

[1] <http://blip.tv/file/812787>

[2]
[http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/ants.clj?gda=T0C_CjoAAAD...](http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/ants.clj?gda=T0C_CjoAAADKqc_OBXvAPFRl94RaAIUvcpc6E-YHRrsRh9IuR-
MtA-9OU0NQiFWgQuhmPR7veGf97daDQaep90o7AOpSKHW0)

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shasta
"- Magnifier:

zoom in and zoom out."

Aw, I was hoping the magnifier did something else.

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fdb
We've created a basic ant simulation as a Python library for NodeBox. NodeBox
runs on Mac but the library is cross-platform.

<http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Ants>

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gourneau
Anyone want to write a HTML5 version? Where the ants are each Erlang
processes?

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josh33
Reminds me of Michael Crichton's "Prey". Let's hope they can't apply these
rules to something living.

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arctangent
I have a really beautiful simulation of ant foraging I coded up in Processing
a while back. I'm currently porting all of this kind of work I have done to
Python (via Pyglet) and will have to remember to post a link to it here when
it's done. (See my profile info for linke to a very small sample.)

* Edit: "A very small sample" of the kind of thing I've been doing. No samples of the ant simulation to share just yet...

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wengzilla
Sim Ant... Brings back some really good memories.

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tectonic
I did a pretty well-received ant harvesting simulation in second life a while
ago.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehEzRUu4_RM>

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phlux
HOLY CRAP!

I have been picturing this software in my head since i was 15!

Although, my version was a game which you build 3d tunnels and Manage a
triangle of resources/ant-classes

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reubenyeah
Repeatedly crashes on Windows 7.

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DanI-S
Evidently the application is full of bugs.

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gourneau
<http://instantrimshot.com/>

