I have a group project writing an agent-​​based pro­gram to sim­u­late the for­aging behav­iour of ants. The NetLogo imple­men­ta­tion of this idea makes it look easy. Turns it out it’s not. Which has lead to lots of inter­esting ques­tions about ants.

Incidentally, the project is being written using the RePast agent based mod­eling libraries for java. Now, I haven’t looked at the code of the NetLogo sample imple­men­ta­tion since I started writing this thing, because we’re not sup­posed to. But I did look at it last semester, and I seem to remember you could fit the code on a tshirt, using a fairly hefty font, if you were so inclined. You could not fit the equiv­a­lent java code on a tshirt. You could not fit it on a muumuu. If nothing else, this project is con­vincing me that as soon as we’re let loose, I’ll be switching to NetLogo. RePast may not be as clumsy or random as a blaster, but NetLogo is just like way faster. Bring on the clumsy and random.

In an effort to answer some of my ques­tions about how real ants have solved their RePast pro­gram­ming issues, I got a copy of Ants at Work by Deborah Gordon out of the library. I was shocked and mildy irri­tated to see that no one has checked out this copy — the only one in the UMich system — before me. WTF? I first read AaW when I was con­tem­plating a project for my final year field course in under­grad, and it sticks in my memory as one of the most inter­esting books I have read. Dr. Gordon studies how it is that indi­vidual ants, obeying no rules out­side of their own tiny heads, somehow come together to form the per­sis­tent yet adapt­able super­or­ganism that is an ant colony. She uses methods ranging from painting indi­vidual ants to dig­ging up colonies with back­hoes. It was my first intro­duc­tion to the idea of emer­gence, before I (or appar­ently Dr. Gordon) had ever heard the word.

I can’t believe nobody else has read it around here. What’s wrong with these people? It’s so much more portable than The Ants, and costs ¹⁄₂₀^th as much, even if you don’t include the cost of the hand cart.

Also, there is a rac­coon sleeping in the garbage bin to the east of the Shapiro library doors.