view/download model file: RedfishAnts_v0_3.nlogo

Author: Stephen Guerin
Co-Researchers: Manoj Gambhir, Stuart Kauffman and Daniel Kunkle

Agent-based modelers are frequently tasked to model organizations or design self-organizing systems from scratch. However, the science of self-organization still lacks foundational laws. While we have a few heuristics for the design and engineering of these system, modeling remains an art form. We anticipate the arrival of a theory of organization. One common feature of all organizing systems is the presence of driving constraints that push a system far-from-equilibrium. We are using the above ant food foraging model as an often cited example of a self-organizing system to explore what it actually means for a model to be far-from-equilibrium. For more detail, check out the paper.

Gambhir, M., Guerin, S., Kauffman, S., Kunkle, D., (2004) Steps toward a possible theory of organization. Proceedings of the International Conference on Complex Systems 2004. New England Complex Systems Institute

In this model, simulated ants leave the food source (blue square), leaving nest pheromone and randomly walk biased by a food pheromone until they encounter a food source (green squares). There, they change state from food-seekers to nest-seekers and start dropping food pheromone while following nest pheromone gradients. It's interesting to note that the presence of the rule that changes the ant state from food-seekers to nest-seekers breaks the symmetry of the ant distribution by creating a greater concentration of nest-seekers near the food and a greater concentration of food-seekers near the nest. This is an example of a far-from-equilibrium condition that we argue drives organization and is a potential from which work can be extracted. To see this effect, set pheromoneAmount to zero, restart the model and select "AntDensity", then switch to "food-seeker density" and "nest-seeker density" to see the contrast.

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