Cemetery Emergence

This simulation shows how a unique cemetary can emerge in a ant colony without any communication between ants nor a global intelligence controlling all ants.

Each ant act independantly, if it finds a dead ant close to the anthill it put it away at a safe sanitary distance and create a new cemetary. If it finds a bigger cemetary it will consider it the new one and start to move the previous one in this one.

We can see in this video that after some time a unique cemetary emmerges at a safe distance from the anthill.

Go around objects

We have implemented a new feature that let the ants go around object in their way.

If they colide with an object they will go in a go around mode and will choose at random a direction between left and right. This choice is influenced by the pheromones arround. Then they will rotate themself in this direction until they can progress. They keep the same direction as long as the object is at sight to prevent them from always changing direction all the time and follow none in practice.

The going arround object start to look nice but we have performance issues the pheromones that we are trying to solve. When it will be working properly with the pheromones the best side of the object should emmerge from the pheromones left before, since the shortest path should have more pheromones, but for now they just pick a direction at random.

Open source !

Our project goes open source, the svn is now in free checkout under FreeBSD License (which is not currently explicit, but it will be soon).
To get the code, open a terminal and type 'svn checkout http://www.clubnix.fr/svn/aints'. If you are running an alternative OS like Microsoft Windows, then intall some junk shareware/freeware.
Actually you will need the alternative OS to develop on this basis since it is a Visual Studio project... Visual Studio is available for free on MSDNAA for Chalmers students (see this : http://www.chalmers.se/en/sections/education/current_students/it-for-students/software).