[NelsonMinar]

Very nice! There's a long history of this kind of simulation, going back to Alan Turing (or before). I used to work doing this kind of thing in the 90s, as part of the Artificial Life community. There's a lot of papers from back then if you're looking for other ideas for agent based simulations or complex systems. For that matter the ALife community itself still exists.

[JKCalhoun]

I remember A. K. Dewdney introducing "Wa-Tor" in Scientific American in the 80's. I was fascinated by those explorations.

(And SimAnt is of course the more obvious parallel to this particular simulation.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa-Tor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimAnt

[louky]

Yeah, there was a discussion of emergence in Gödel, Escher, Bach[0] published 1979.

"Aunt Hillary" was the super-organism created from the actions of the indivdual ants, IIRC.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%2C_Escher%2C_Bach