[Coding Challenge Suggestion] [Nature of Code] Antz!

Here's a Coding Challenge Suggestion/Project:

The goal of "Antz" is to show that from a very simple set of rules, repeated by many agents (here virtual ants!), a complex task can be executed.

For "Antz" the basic rules are:

when not carrying food:
- search randomly (e.g. Gaussian randomness) ; they start from the nest.
- if some food is found then pick it up
- else if a 'strong enough' pheromone trail is found then try to follow it

when carrying food:
- go back to the nest in the shortest possible way
- leave a pheromone trail behind
- if the nest is reached, put the food down.

The pheromone trail fades away as the time goes by. I would make the trail not a single pixel wide line, but instead a few pixels wide with a gradient from the ant actual path. The pheromones from several ants accumulate.
A food source disappears when empty (several sources are generated when starting).
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In a further/2nd version, some obstacles could be added to show that the ants "choose" the shortest way around an obstacle, due to the fact that the short path has a more dense pheromone trail than the longest which eventually gets discarded. (This principle is studied in the data routing/networking field).
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My own amateur example can be found here : https://github.com/fphenix/Antz

Cheers!

Fred L.