Simulation of Artificial Ant's Behavior in a Digital Environment.
Paulo Merloti, Joseph A. Lewis · 2005
Abstract — Ants present a very good natural metaphor to evolutionary computation. While each individual’s computational power is small compared to more evolved species, it is the power of their colonies that inspire computer scientists. This paper presents “Ant Box Simulator”, a software that allows the simulation of ants in a restricted environment. The simulator demonstrates how digital ants make use of an autocatalytic behavior in order to collectively find a solution for a posed problem in reasonable time. We also show that while pheromones play an important role on biological ant’s navigation, it is not the only sense they rely on. Index Terms—Swarm intelligence, artificial life, ant algorithms, emergence.