Termites

Termites is a small emergent construction model from the Logo and NetLogo teaching tradition. The appeal is that clustering appears without any termite knowing what a pile is or where one should go.

Wood chips are patch state, while termite pets wander randomly with a short carrying lifecycle. A termite picks up a chip when it finds one, keeps moving until it encounters another chip, drops its chip nearby, and leaves the pile before wandering again. Repeating that local pickup/drop loop gradually turns scattered chips into visible mounds.