Anyone interested in this kind of emergent behavior should check out a great project I worked on years back called Starlogo at the MIT Media Lab. It was design

Anyone interested in this kind of emergent behavior should check out a great project I worked on years back called Starlogo at the MIT Media Lab. It was designed to help anyone understand decentralized systems and emergent behavior. Here's a video with a demo of ants foraging for food - basically ants are red, food is blue, and pheromones are green: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9liT8epLnAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9liT8epLnAQ You could "program" individual ant behavior and tweak parameters to see how that impacted the overall behavior (how far do ants go from the nest? How fast do pheromones dissipate? etc). It's mostly defunct now, but it looks like there is an online version called StarLogo Nova, you see a sample and play with it at http://www.slnova.org/djwendel/projects/2/ http://www.slnova.org/djwendel/projects/2/