A version of langton's ant with many ants that evolve their rule sets and compete for resources
This code is able to simulate a colony of langton's ants. Each ant has their own set of rules for how to move and change the environment. These ants will overtime will adapt to better survive in their environment. Each ant has a limited lifetime and must find food to reproduce. Food will only spawn on tiles with certain criteria and so ants must either create or find environments where food is able to grow if they wish to survive.
As one species of ant begins to become successful in a niche it often changes the environment openning up new niches. Species will evolve, create ecosystems compete with other species and sometimes go extinct until a somewhat stable state is reached. Each ant on it's own is ridiculously simple made up of just a set of simple rules to guide their movement but with such a large number of ants complex emergent behaviours arise.
This is a test in artificial life and evolutionary algorithms meant to mimic the evolution of simple life forms like mold.
The code was written fall 2018.
