[HN Gopher] Show HN: Ants Sandbox - an ants simulator
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Ants Sandbox - an ants simulator
I was inspired to make a web based ants simulator after watching
this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81GQNPJip2Y Any
feedback appreciated. Best viewed on Chromium based browsers.
Firefox is slow for some reason and Safari is not tested as I don't
have a Mac.
Author : tulustul
Score : 282 points
Date : 2022-07-10 09:48 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ants-sandbox.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ants-sandbox.io)
| sa1 wrote:
| Individual ants might be smarter than you give them credit for:
| they've been known to pass the mirror test.
|
| https://www.scinapse.io/papers/2180773430
| fho wrote:
| One thing that is missing from this simulation is that (at least
| some) ant species walk straight back to their nest once they
| found some food. They do this (as far as we know) by accumulating
| each step they take into what is called the "home vector",
| effectively integrating the whole path they took. That way they
| always know which way is "back to the nest". There is a vast
| amount of papers on the topic. Some (personal) highlights:
|
| If you put the ants on stilts they will follow the same home
| vector, but because each step on stilts is effectively longer
| they will overshoot the target:
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Fig4-Odometry-by-stride-...
|
| If the ant is placed close to the nest after gathering food, it
| will still follow its home vector ... away from the nest:
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2004...
|
| Crazy little buggers these ants.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Hah, that reminds me of a robotics competition I took part in
| at school.
|
| Robots were placed in an arena, and the objective was to gather
| QR-marked boxes, and bring them back "home".
|
| There were also QR codes placed at known locations around the
| arena, and the intention was that you could use them for
| navigation. However, the camera systems were pretty flakey
| (especially under unpredictable lighting conditions), so we
| wanted to avoid using them as much as possible. So, we put
| rotary encoders on our wheels, and integrated the readings to
| calculate a "home vector" for the return journey, just like you
| described.
|
| At the time, I wasn't aware that this was an ant-inspired
| technique - but it was very effective, and we won the
| competition. Thanks, ants!
| x0hm wrote:
| thants
| eclipticplane wrote:
| Bless you ants.
|
| Blants. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaI6kBVyu00 - Look
| Around You
| fho wrote:
| The crazy thing is how good the ants are at this. Especially
| considering their brain size.
|
| With robots it works ok, but over time small errors
| accumulate. After travelling for a while the home error will
| be off.
|
| In contrast desert ants are able to do this trick after
| travelling for hundreds of meters.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| My only feedback is that this is amazing. I would gladly pay for
| a fleshed out version of this. SimAnt was an old favorite of
| mine.
| mywacaday wrote:
| I think it crashed my phone, froze between tutorial steps and
| when I looked back my phone, a galaxy note 10+ had restarted.
| x86x87 wrote:
| smcleod wrote:
| Gives me nostalgia for playing Sim Ant when I was young.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimAnt
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Sim Ant and Sim Earth are both begging for remakes!
| noduerme wrote:
| Yup, I loved both those games. SimEarth in particular would
| be fantastic for a remake... lots of stuff you can learn
| about climate change from that game. Maxis did such excellent
| work building the systems that you could probably work from
| the original sim logic and build something massive in Unity
| mostly focusing on the graphics.
| folli wrote:
| I don't understand why there's no true SimCity remake (not
| this Mobile game crap). It's a surefire commercial success.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Even the spiritual successor Cities Skylines is getting old
| at this point. There's a few other city-building games that
| almost nail it but the devs always add in something that
| makes it too micro-managey like production chains.
| eproxus wrote:
| Personally I like the production chains in Cities
| Skylines. I feel they add purpose to the design of the
| road network and handling of traffic problems. I just
| wish the AI was a ton better (there are a few mods that
| help though).
| throwaway413 wrote:
| My dog is currently running a similar study from the balcony to
| her dog food bowl.
|
| Every day I move the bowl, every night they find it, and every
| morning I spend battling soldier ants.
|
| The tour was really enjoyable to watch through, thanks for
| sharing this!
| mthoms wrote:
| Have a little fun with it. Chalk can disrupt the ant's route
| finding. At least for a little while.
|
| https://homeguides.sfgate.com/kind-chalk-used-keep-ants-away...
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Very nice! There's a long history of this kind of simulation,
| going back to Alan Turing (or before). I used to work doing this
| kind of thing in the 90s, as part of the Artificial Life
| community. There's a lot of papers from back then if you're
| looking for other ideas for agent based simulations or complex
| systems. For that matter the ALife community itself still exists.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I remember A. K. Dewdney introducing "Wa-Tor" in Scientific
| American in the 80's. I was fascinated by those explorations.
|
| (And SimAnt is of course the more obvious parallel to this
| particular simulation.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa-Tor
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimAnt
| louky wrote:
| Yeah, there was a discussion of emergence in _Godel, Escher,
| Bach_ [0] published 1979.
|
| "Aunt Hillary" was the super-organism created from the actions
| of the indivdual ants, IIRC.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%2C_Escher%2C_Bach
| adnanc wrote:
| Brings back memories of my final year dissertation at University
| nearly 20 years ago, "An emergent model of an Ant colony" (in
| VRML and Javascript).
|
| Incredibly fascinating and great to see this.
| hughrlomas wrote:
| This is great to see. Years ago I created a basic simulation
| using the same principles of pheromone gradients, one for the
| nest and one for food. https://youtu.be/VsHc91IhzdI
|
| It a fascinating example of emergent behavior from simple rules.
|
| I've been wanting to find time to revisit the concept and produce
| an updated version, your simulation seems to include everything I
| wanted to do and more.
| testmasterflex wrote:
| Super cool!
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| cool, but this needs WebGL or something as I'm getting 8 fps
| drivers99 wrote:
| When I touch the screen on iPad, everything goes black. Edit:
| it's usable if I only use the gui element to zoom out one step
| and don't scroll or zoom.
|
| I was thinking: what if workers also fight? I think they
| generally do in real life.
| tulustul wrote:
| Unfortunately, I don't posses any Apple device so I cannot fix
| it.
|
| You're right, workers do fight in the real life. It's one of
| many simplifications in the simulation. Real world is much more
| complex
| noman-land wrote:
| Looks like the same thing happens on an Android phone as
| well.
| MonsieurMoony wrote:
| Just curious, can't device emulation on Chrome and other
| browsers help reproduce the issue?
| nullwarp wrote:
| Negatory, there's literally no way other than owning an
| apple device. I have a stack of bugs in a FLOSS app I can't
| fix for safari because I don't have a mac anymore.
|
| I guess I could try to boot a hackintosh but it's not worth
| the effort to me.
| detritus wrote:
| May I ask - in the early stages, when a wandering ant encounters
| its first food pheromone trail, is there a logic that dictates
| which direction it chooses to then follow? It has two options -
| towards the source of the food, or away from. The latter
| resulting in a wasted journey home before a hoped-for bounce
| back.
|
| - ed - it seems to me that they always go towards the food, is
| all.
|
| - ed - ed : Great work, btw! SimAnt was a big favourite as a kid,
| so this is right up my street! :)
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| What happens when there is a circular path. Do all ants follow
| it until they die?
| detritus wrote:
| Yes. The system breaks down locally.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill
|
| - ed - d'oh, sorry - I have no idea how this works in the
| simulation, but I guess This. :)
| Cameri wrote:
| Doesn't work well on Firefox Android. Zooming in causes the map
| to fly away who knows where.
| foobiekr wrote:
| I was trying to create a circular mill with rock placement
| without luck. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEKwQxO4EZU
| bcjordan wrote:
| Really love this, it can create such amazing visuals (before the
| ants erase them with the "no food left" signal!)
|
| Fun to read through the TS/Vue/PixiJS source as well, thanks for
| open sourcing it. Nicely built!
|
| Could imagine this being a fun base upon which to build a game
| like Liquid War https://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/
| adenozine wrote:
| How does the draw function work? I can't seem to draw food or
| rocks when I try. Latest MS Edge on Windows 10.
| tulustul wrote:
| You should be able to draw with right mouse button. Is this how
| you try it? Does it work on other browsers?
| seszett wrote:
| I don't have a right mouse button. On OSX, I use ctrl+click
| as an equivalent (normally) to the right mouse button.
|
| But it might be because of my convoluted setup (using the
| touchpad on Linux on a Macbook to control OSX on another Mac
| using barrier) so I'm not sure if it's actually relevant,
| don't sweat it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yeah, right-click drawing is not the most intuitive. I
| found it purely by accident.
| adenozine wrote:
| Ah! In fact, it does. Thanks!
| xixixao wrote:
| The tours are awesome! The last one (with soldiers) stops working
| after the first Next tap (iOS, Safari).
| [deleted]
| geuis wrote:
| Sorry but this completely fails on iOS. Can't touch the controls,
| zoom in or out, etc.
| mthoms wrote:
| Works for me.
| wdfx wrote:
| The simulation works fine on Firefox on Android. But touching the
| map causes it to fly out of view and I can never get it back.
| Might benefit from a Centre View button for navigation.
| dddw wrote:
| Can confirm
| floodle wrote:
| Also get this on Firefox on Android. Would love to restart the
| step but it looks like you would have to cancel the whole tour
| and start over.
|
| Really enjoyed it though! Love the retro vibe.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-10 23:00 UTC)