Ant Colony
Top-down view of a foraging colony on a patch of sandy ground. The nest hole is the only part of it you can see — the colony itself runs off underground. Drop food and watch scouts wander it down, then recruit the rest by scent.
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Runs entirely in your browser. Real foraging ants walk a correlated random walk while searching — short straight-ish stretches broken up by small turns in a similar-but-not-identical direction, meandering rather than darting — and their turning angle and speed trade off: tight, slow turning while genuinely lost, long fast near-straight travel once a scent or a target is locked on. Ants steer by tropotaxis, comparing the concentration each antenna picks up and turning toward whichever side smells stronger; that’s modeled here as three sense points fanned out ahead of each ant. With nothing to go on, an ant holds a lazy drifting heading at low speed. The moment it picks up trail scent or spots food, the randomness drops out, its turn radius opens up, and its pace picks up, so it locks on and commits to a straight run at the target. Loaded ants turn for home and unreel an internal dead-reckoning vector back to the nest — the same trick real desert ants use, and just as imperfect, so they arrive a little off and have to search the last few steps — laying scent the whole way home. That scent lingers for several seconds, long enough for other searching ants to cross it, lock on, and follow it back out at a run; a busy route gets walked more, gets more scent, and pulls in more ants, which is the same feedback loop that lets real colonies converge on the shorter of two paths to a food source. Drop Crumb, Chunk or Feast to add food; a source disappears once it’s hauled away.