Alife

For those of you who were involved in the
'Degrees of Rotation' thread and have seen my
Ants program, You might be interested in this.
I've completely started over, only this time i've added a scent radius around the food and kept the code nice and readable.
(though i'm still not used to declaring all my variables
every time i use them... especially if they are temporary and only used in one circumstance.)
Anyways, I'm working on adding a monitoring form (instead of having the population and whatnot shown on the main form where the ants are)
It's not as complete as the other version, (not that that was anywhere near complete to begin with) but a lot of the basics are there. I still need to add intelligence levels and farming/carrying capabilities to it.
There does seem to be one major glitch that i'm having trouble locating, and it's the cause of most of the ant deaths. sometimes when they know where food is, they try to get to it and appear to be blocked somehow. they just sit there and move left and right (or up and down) in a (for some reason) futile effort to reach the food they seek, even though it may be only a few pixels away.

It looks great, but what exactly is going on ?

Well, once it becomes complex enough, it will use random
numbers within attributes to immitate the behavior of insects and
other life forms. right now, the only "need" they have is to eat, so they race around the screen trying to find food.
I've updated my version since to incorporate breeding and farming (they can carry food and seed the ground to produce more food)

the tendancy is that once the population becomes large enough,
(or food becomes scarce enough) the "ants" will flock together in large groups or "colonies" if you will, and even mimick our own societal behavior on a simplistic level.

of course, the older version (when they had a sight radius as opposed to the food being scented) was a lot more complex and showed these tendancies much better, this one should start heading in a similar direction with one major change.
It will be easier for the ants to find food (and each other)
and they will actually compete to reach a piece of food first.
If you want any more explanation, just ask. :)

If you can figure out why they seem to be repelled by certain pieces of food when they are trying to reach them or why they occasionally freeze and do nothing until they die, please let me know, as it's been bugging me for days...

I almost forgot...
does the version I posted actually have death from
starvation programmed in yet or is that something i've added since I posted that version?