NetLogo User Community Models

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Download If clicking does not initiate a download, try right clicking or control clicking and choosing "Save" or "Download".(The run link is disabled for this model because it was made in a version prior to NetLogo 6.0, which NetLogo Web requires.)

## WHAT IS IT?

In this project, a colony of ants forages for food. Though each ant follows a set of simple rules, the colony as a whole acts in a sophisticated way.
There are two different species of ants that fight when they meet.
The ants carry energy. They also have a maximum life length (age-to-die).
The food pile are constantly refilled at a refill-rate beetween Time_Between_growth ticks.

## HOW IT WORKS

When an ant finds a piece of food, it carries the food back to the nest, dropping a chemical as it moves. When other ants "sniff" the chemical, they follow the chemical toward the food. As more ants carry food to the nest, they reinforce the chemical trail.
When a brazilian ant meets an amazonian ant, they fight. The one with the more energy survives but loose the amount of energy the dead one had.

Food gives a certain amount of energy. When ants get back to nest, they give half the energy they carry to the nest except if they are starving.
The more enery the nest have, the more it produces ants.

## HOW TO USE IT

Click the SETUP button to set up the ant nest (in violet, at center) and three piles of food. Click the GO button to start the simulation. The chemical is shown in a green-to-white gradient.

The EVAPORATION-RATE slider controls the evaporation rate of the chemical. The DIFFUSION-RATE slider controls the diffusion rate of the chemical.

If you want to change the number of ants, move the POPULATION slider before pressing SETUP.

Other sliders are explained above.

## THINGS TO NOTICE

With certain settings, you can obtain an equilibrium with the two colonies surviving. The clues can be:
- Enough food (heavy refill rate or/and short time between growth)
- Live long enough
- Food is rich

## HOW TO CITE

This work is based upon:

* Wilensky, U. (1997). NetLogo Ants model. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Ants. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.
* Wilensky, U. (1999). NetLogo. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

It was enhanced by:
* Enée, G. (2015). You can get it through http://www.i3s.unice.fr/~enee

## COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2015 Gilles Enée.

Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International rules.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/