Phenomena modelled
Nature
Flocks, colonies, ecosystems, and collective life.
Living things that coordinate without a plan: birds that flock, ants that forage, predators and prey that keep each other in check.
Models 9
9 models in this collection.
Biology & ecologyFlocking
How far does each bird need to see for flocks to form?Craig Reynolds' boids, as NetLogo implements them. Each bird turns away from its nearest neighbour if it's too close; otherwise it turns toward its neighbours' average heading and toward their centre.
Biology & ecologyFlocking 3D
How do the same flocking rules behave with an extra dimension?Separation, alignment, and cohesion throughout a three-dimensional volume.
Biology & ecologyAnts
How much do the chemical trails speed up the colony's foraging?Ants leave a central nest one per tick to search for three food piles. Ants carrying food home lay a chemical that searching ants follow, and the nearest pile is empty after about 200 ticks.
Biology & ecologyWolf Sheep Predation
Can wolves and sheep coexist, or does one always wipe out the other?Sheep and wolves wander a 51 × 51 torus, eat, breed and starve. With regrowing grass both species persist for thousands of ticks; without it, one of them is gone within a few hundred.
Biology & ecologySlime
What decides whether the molds gather into a few big clusters or stay in a scattered web?Molds wander, drop chemical, and turn toward the richest of the three patches ahead. The chemical spreads and evaporates, and the molds gather into dense clusters joined by fainter streams.
Biology & ecologyFireflies
How far must a firefly see for the whole field to flash together?Fireflies wander with 20-tick clocks and flash when the clock wraps. Seeing a flash late in its cycle moves a firefly's clock ahead, and after about 800 to 2,600 ticks most of them flash together.
Biology & ecologyTermites
How long do wandering termites take to gather scattered chips into a few piles?400 termites wander a board strewn with wood chips. Each picks up a chip it bumps into and drops it beside the next chip it finds, and the chips slowly collect into fewer, bigger piles.
Biology & ecologyDaisyworld
How much do the daisies cool the planet when the sun gets brighter?Black and white daisies colonise bare ground and die at random. Black ones warm the planet and white ones cool it, so under a brighter sun whites spread and keep it cooler than bare ground.
Biology & ecologyXenobots
How many bots can the dish support when new cells trickle in slowly?An abstract take on kinematic self-replication in xenobots. Bots swim with a pulsing gait, collect loose stem cells, and every 6 cells collected become a new bot.