🐜 Colony Ant Simulator

This is a program designed to simulate the behavior of ants using Python 3.

📖 Overview

Simulation Modes: The program offers two simulation modes: "theory" and "reality." In the "reality" mode, ants consume energy, and new ants are generated if there is enough food.
Movement and Energy: Ants move based on predefined movement patterns and have energy levels. Ants lose energy over time, and their movement is influenced by their energy.
Ant Behavior Simulation: The program simulates the behavior of ants in an environment, where ants move around randomly, search for food, and return to the nest.

🐜 Explanation of the Ants' behaviour.

If the scout (also refered to as an ant) discovers a food source, it returns somewhat directly to the nest, leaving a trail of pheromones on it's way
- These pheromones attract other ants, causing them to follow the trail
- When ants return to the nest they reinforce the trail with more pheromones.
When two paths lead to the same food source, the shorter one is used by more scouts compared to the longer path.
- This causes the short path to become increasingly reinforced and attractive.
- Over time, the pheromones on the long path evaporate, causing it to disappear.
- Eventually, ants will only use the shortest path.

⚙️ Running the Program, and Setting Parameters.

ⓘ Note
At the moment this program can't run, it seems that the current dependencies prevent the program from launching.

To Install the program, use the following command.

git clone https://github.com/riiswa/colony-ant-simulator
cd ~/colony-ant-simulator/

To launch the program, use the following command. By default, the game starts in "Theory" mode, think of it as "Arcade" mode:

python3 colony_ant_simulator.py

You can switch to "Reality" mode with the following command, think of "Reality" mode as "Realism" mode:

python3 colony_ant_simulator.py -m reality

For help with the options use the -h flag:

usage: python3 colony_ant_simulator.py [-h] [-m [{theory,reality}]] [n_ants]

Simulation of ants colony in python.

positional arguments:
  n_ants                Number of ants (recommended: 10-100; default: random number between 10 and 100)

options:
  -h, --help            Show this help message and exit
  -m [{theory,reality}] Simulation mode (default: "theory")

📸 Screenshots

The Algorithm in action:

🛠️ Prerequisites

Python 3.11
Coloraide, install with the command pip install coloraide
Tkinter, install with the command sudo apt-get install python3-tk