Ants

Description

Now you can have Your Own Digital Antfarm (YODA) too! The Ants library provides easy-to-understand tools to implement cooperative foraging behaviour for small animals like ants. Ants in real-life are pretty cool. They work together in a social context, communicating by means of pheromone scent. Ants are capable of finding food, building burial grounds, even herding caterpillars (led to feeding areas in the daytime, and brought inside the ants' nest at night)!

Essentially, an ant in the Ants library has four simple behaviours:

Wander: run around aimlessly in search for food
Follow: if a pheromone trail is encountered, follow it to the food
Harvest: if food is nearby, collect it
Hoard: when carrying food, head straight home leaving a trail of scent

Download

ants.zip (3KB)
Last updated for NodeBox 1.0rc7.

Commands in the Boids library

colony()
food()
Ant.forage()
Ant.trail[]
Ant.goal()
Ant.near()

Example

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