The ants are not even close to individuals. They’re dots. They’re dots that you move around.
This just seems like a failure of imagination to me.
You could think of the game as just pushing around dots. But if you write a rule for pushing the dots that works for each dot and has no global constraints, then you are treating the dots like individuals with individual decision rules.
Example. On each turn, roll a fair four-sided die. If the result is ‘1’, go North. If the result is ‘2’, go South. Etc.
The effect is to push around all the dots each turn. But it’s not at all silly to describe what you would be coding here as giving each ant a very simple decision rule. Any global behavior—behavior exhibited by the colony—is due to each ant having this specific decision rule.
If you want a colony filled with real individuals, tweak the dumb rule by weighting the die in a new (slight) way for each new ant generated. Then every ant will have a slightly different decision rule.
Note that I am not trying to say anything smart about what rule(s) should be implemented for the ants, only illustrating the thought that it is not crazy—and might even be helpful—to think about the ants as individuals with individual decision rules.
This just seems like a failure of imagination to me.
You could think of the game as just pushing around dots. But if you write a rule for pushing the dots that works for each dot and has no global constraints, then you are treating the dots like individuals with individual decision rules.
Example. On each turn, roll a fair four-sided die. If the result is ‘1’, go North. If the result is ‘2’, go South. Etc.
The effect is to push around all the dots each turn. But it’s not at all silly to describe what you would be coding here as giving each ant a very simple decision rule. Any global behavior—behavior exhibited by the colony—is due to each ant having this specific decision rule.
If you want a colony filled with real individuals, tweak the dumb rule by weighting the die in a new (slight) way for each new ant generated. Then every ant will have a slightly different decision rule.
Note that I am not trying to say anything smart about what rule(s) should be implemented for the ants, only illustrating the thought that it is not crazy—and might even be helpful—to think about the ants as individuals with individual decision rules.