How long do wandering termites take to gather scattered chips into a few piles? By tick 1,000 the even scatter of yellow chips has clumped into a few hundred small piles; by tick 20,000 about ten piles of several hundred to 1,200 chips hold nearly all of them.
Try this Raise population from 400 to 1000 and press Reset (it is read only at setup). By tick 4,000 fewer than 20 piles of 10 or more chips are left, against about 45 with 400 termites.
About this model Where it ends up
The wood-chip termites from Mitchel Resnick's Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (1994), in Uri Wilensky's NetLogo version. No termite has any notion of a pile, but because chips are only put down beside other chips, a pile can lose its last chip while new piles almost never start in open ground, so the number of piles keeps falling.
Setup puts a chip on density percent of the 201 × 201 patches and scatters population termites; both params are read only at setup. Each tick, in random order, each termite makes one move chosen by its state and whether it stands on a chip. A wandering termite on a chip picks it up and jumps 20 patches. A carrying termite that reaches a chip starts dropping, stepping in random directions until it finds an empty patch, puts the chip there and jumps 20 patches away, repeating the jump until it lands off the chips. Otherwise termites wiggle, stepping 1 and turning up to 49° each way.
