Virtual Ants | Hacker News Reader

Virtual Ants

healeycodes.com

99 pointshealeycodes14 comments

I spent way too many hours simulating ants (among other creatures) during Covid lockdown:

Latest version: https://into-the-thicket.s3.amazonaws.com/versions/0.2.7.1+-...

Hey there! Nice work building something during lockdown :)

I am also tinkering around with wanting to build a zen-management, ant simulation game. https://meomix.github.io/antfarm/ Mine is going in an entirely different direction than yours, but the base idea seems quite similar.

The vision I am working towards is to build a desire for users to check-in for one minute at the start of each day and tend to their ants. There's a lot of directions this could go, though, and it's been tough for me to confidently determine what I'm optimizing for / iterating towards.

Are you interested in sharing ideas at all?

Related, Ants Sandbox: https://www.ants-sandbox.io/ , recently discussed on HN at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32043229 .

I am not the author, I just remembered about this submission. Also, I find it fascinating that there are so many ways to approach building this kind of simulator.

Thanks! I agree, there's a surprising amount of tinkering going on in this space and everyone's got a different approach. I'm determined to see it as a lot of opportunity not a lot of competition :D

I think I am going to go ask r/antkeeping what they think makes ants cool and see if there are more emergent behaviors beyond pathfinding that are relevant.

There's a variant of Conway's Game of Life called Wireworld which is turing complete. The idea is that there is a "signal" traveling along a wire. You can try it here, try programming a calculator if you have a lot of hours to spare: https://xalava.github.io/WireWorld/

Back in the day Golly was the best software for playing around with Game of Life variants, might still be true: http://golly.sourceforge.net/

Talking about WireWorld, we're making a game that involves drawing circuits. It's written in Unity and will feature 20ish levels, but we have a very early web-based prototype: https://charperbonaroo.github.io/bls/#0

It runs a larger circuit pretty fast and allows editing while it's running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXYpvb1jkp8

Conway’s Game of Life is also Turing complete.

> You can try it here, try programming a calculator if you have a lot of hours to spare

Somebody even built a complete computer in it: https://www.quinapalus.com/wi-index.html

Anyone interested in this should also check out Rudy Rucker & John Walker’s work on cellular automata [1]. These guys were obsessed with ants, hence ‘fourmi’ labs, fourmi meaning ‘ant’ in French.

Both of these guys have done incredible things. Rucker wrote the Ware tetralogy and Walker owned/engineered AutoCAD.

Rucker also wrote ‘The Hacker and the Ants’ where the protagonist (basically Rudy himself) takes on a virus which manifests as a virtual ant. Really quirky story, well worth reading.

[1]: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/

Shades of SimAnt https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimAnt_-_The_Electronic_An...

Many years ago I took (oddly) a physics class called (iirc) "Self Organisation" while doing a year abroad in Germany. Despite being a quite small class, it really inspired me from the perspective of self organizing systems.

I find structures like conways game of life, or slime mold or sand dunes to be fascinating for this reason. That from unit simplicity can emerge aggregate complexity, imitating facets of nature.

This stuff is fascinating, but also very humbling. Conway, fractals etc is truly a testament to how few and simple ingredients can create structures that are virtually impossible to analyze and predict without running the simulation. It speaks volumes about our limitations.

> Putting this all in perspective, if physicists ever uncover a Theory of Everything for our universe, and even if we deduce the initial state of the universe, we may still be helpless to deduce the long-term behavior of our own universe. Thus, as Stewart has said, the Theory of Everything in this case predicts everything but explains nothing.

Isn't it the other way around with these cell automatons? We have explanation (cause we know all the rules and the initial configuration) but we don't have enough computational power to predict anything meaningfull long term.

That green CRT "Ridley Scott Alien" demo is really compelling. I know it's from an actual CRT decades ago, but it would still work well today.

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