Watching Planet Ant on the BBC. Have already emailed Andy Hart - will contact Bristol Uni's Ant Lab. Renergised an old idea of mine, inspired by living with Ants, both in India as an 11 year old
(when we were at Dharwad University accommodation visiting family friends working there. I was chased around the 70s open plan living room, and seriously frightened, by a pair of angry hornets , one of whom I later found on the floor next to my bed when I awoke the next day. A trail of ants were slowly dissecting it, and had laid its body parts out like a dismantled toy aeroplane, and I was fascinated by the way they had done this, how they organised themselves, and how I felt that they were my protectors, having clearly fought and killed my tormentor of the previous day)
...and when I've lived in Turkey, Thailand and Vietnam more recently, and realised how destructive they can be, both to crops, and to bags of sugar unwisely left on kitchen surfaces! Oh the flying termites in rainy season!
Main game idea:
On individual machines (including smart phones and tablet devices) mimic the behaviour of ants in a colony, each device modelling the behaviour of one ant. One can take control of one's ant, or transmit identity through pheromone exchange with another user.
Game play would involve negotiating the landscape to find food sources, new colony sites when old areas exhausted or too small, dealing with Acts of God ( or Mod! ) such as flooding, cave ins, attacks by Praying Mantides and eventually inter colony raids.
Aim is to grow the colony to allow more users to join. Different ant types could be modelled, allowing users to take on different tasks. Rock, fire, leaf cutter, etc
It would be a much simplified visual environment, pheromone trails represented as slowly fading coloured lines - green for leaves, red for alert, blue for queen etc. possibly black or white screen, vector edges.
Inspiration
THEM! Communist terror! 1950s giant ant movie and 80s Amiga game...
The ant colony is a computer, used in terry Pratchet's disk World Series, which, along with Tron, inspired my aesthetic ideas.
Empire of the ants, novel by Belgian, read as a late teen.
Travelling Salesperson Problem - ACO ant colony optimisation used to find shortish routes
Mar. 28, 2013 — Scientists have successfully replicated the behaviour of a colony of ants on the move with the use of miniature robots, as reported in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. The researchers, based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, USA) and at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (Toulouse, France), aimed to discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130329090614.htm
Adam Hart, who presented Planet Ant, kindly emailed me this link to ant foraging simulation!
ReplyDeleteAnt Foraging Sim