@futurebird @Em back in the 90s there was a lot of interest in generating complex structures and behaviors from the simplest possible rules programmed into simulated ants. Most of my experiments have gone, lost on long-abandoned hard drives, but it was a lot of fun, and very instructive. I gave one group a whole bunch of phobias, and they ended up assembling themselves into four-layer pyramids.
This is a different type of experiment in the same vein, where a few different strains of "ants" follow instructions encoded into "DNA". The ants with the highest energy levels breed and create offspring with merged DNA. Usually they all die out, but sometimes after a series of population crashes a stable colony is established with a dominant ant species.
GitHub - geekbrit/ignatius: "Ants" experiments - see the Predation branch for a more complex ecosystem
"Ants" experiments - see the Predation branch for a more complex ecosystem - geekbrit/ignatius
GitHub (github.com)
The code is a 2012 rewrite in Python of my 1995 original, but might inspire new experiments.
