First try on the project

We did a first try with a flash animation to simulate an ant colony. The anthill is represented by a yellow square, the ants by a black one, the food is red and the obstacles are gray. The ants go randomly at first but they put pheromones on their way, and the other ants will most likely go for a "pheromoned" path. Once a food resource is found, the ant grab one unit of it and bring it back to the anthill following the pheromone path, and making it stronger.
Every time 10 unit of food are gathered a new ant is produced, which will look for more food. In this example two ant colonies are competing with each other, to allow us to compare the choice of different parameters. Here, the top left anthill is using less random parameters, and we can observe that it will generally loose.

We will then upgrade the project by having more ants and get rid of the squares to have a more natural look. Also we may try to use a genetic algorithm to find the parameters that lead to the most efficient and the most realistic behavior.