a) ants are cute
b) ants are super interesting how they optimise large scale problems (like finding food)
So, following on from my flocking experiments (although hopefully a bit simpler) I’m mucking around with ant hunt algorithms.
The basic gist of how ants find food and tell their buddies where it is is – they walk about, leaving pheromones behind them. If they find food, they then follow their own path back to the nest, strengthening the path. As the other ants are walking about, they’ll tend to follow a stronger (more smelly) path than a less smelly one.
This is all really rather cool. I like the idea of second-order control. You do things to the environment to try and improve the ants’ behaviour, in order to achieve a goal. Should be fun.
Ok. So I have the ants appearing, walking around randomly, and (when they reach the edge of the screen) retracing their path back to base and dying. Awesome. Their trail gets printed out – which is kinda cool, so you can see where they go. There’s an ugly big bit of apparently unidentifiable food (it was supposed to be a sweet, dammit, time for a new image) in the middle of the screen.
Next:
- Make previous paths influence path choice (ie, if there’s a strong pheromone laid down, other ants will follow it)
- Make the “found the food!” thing a thing
The second one is trivial. The first… a little more interesting.
Ha ha. So, I’m making the ants a bit smarter – they’ll smell a pheromone trail if they run over it, plus run less distance away when they’re following a trail. Previously they’d just target roughly the same direction (but a bit finer tuned). The flipside is, they’re now behaving like maniacs. Ha ha.
