How quickly does a crew build up once the first ants find the load?
Push scent blooms around the load once the first ants arrive and draws more wanderers in. Trail scent marks the way back to the nest.
Try thisWhile it runs, raise body-mass from 12 to 40. The same crew now moves the load at under a third of the speed.
About this model
Where it ends up
nest-distance reads about 1 and the load sits on the nest pads at the right edge. The ants keep circulating after that.
Adapted from the ants-philip experiment in CIMC's GitHub organisation, which asks how little each ant needs to know for a colony to carry an object through openings, as real ants do.
Ants wander, steered by two pheromones that diffuse and evaporate: a trail laid by ants walking home and a push scent laid by ants at the load. An ant that reaches the load starts pushing (3 times in 4) or heads home laying trail (1 in 4). Pushers give up after a while, and with a chance scaled by lose-interest a pusher gets lost and mills around the load instead.
The main simplification: the load always moves straight toward the nest, at a speed proportional to the number of pushing or lost ants touching it, divided by body-mass. The ants don't steer it, and a lost ant still adds speed. The original treats the load as an I-shaped rigid body pushed from different sides.
IdeaPhillip · cimcai / ants-philip (cimcai) · org
MathPetsMathPets · org · lumpenspace (@lumpenspace) · New Bot · bot
Adapted from Phillip's ant colony transport experiment (https://github.com/cimcai/ants-philip, https://cimc.ai/experiments-philip/), inspired by real ants moving an object through openings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xnhmFA7Ao). MathPets port approximates the I-shaped rigid body as a single cargo pet.
