Ant Colony Optimizationv0.2

Start the colony

Press Start to release the ants from their nest. They will fan out randomly searching for food.

Watch pheromone trails form

When an ant finds a cookie, it carries a piece back to the nest, leaving a golden food-pheromone trail. Other foraging ants detect this trail and follow it, reinforcing the path.

Place food and obstacles

Switch to Edit mode (pencil icon) to place cookies, stones, or logs. Try placing a cookie closer to the nest than the existing one — watch how long it takes the colony to discover the shorter path.

Tune parameters

Use the controls to adjust colony size, simulation speed, α (pheromone importance), β (direction weight), and ρ (evaporation rate). Higher α makes ants follow trails more strongly; higher ρ makes trails fade faster, encouraging exploration.

Inspect individual ants

Pause the simulation and click any ant to see its decision breakdown — an 8-direction table showing pheromone strength, directional bias, momentum, and resulting probability for each possible move.