Mason Inman - science journalist

2007-07-06, 13:47:39

I just found out about an ant colony that's thriving in the online virtual world, Second Life.

As the site New World Notes reports: 

Tectonic's ants leave a pheromone trail in their random wanderings, and once they locate food, go into a Recruit mode, and search for nearby ants, so they can be set onto the food finder's successful pheromone path.  (To prevent all the crisscrossing trails from causing a pile-up of legs and antennae, Tectonic has programmed the pheromones to decay in potency over time.)

The creator made a video showing how he did it, posted here, and Boing Boing also has a post about this.

This is pretty cool. I wrote an article for National Geographic News a few months back about other people working on life-like creatures in Second Life, but it looks like these ants work more smoothly, and have more complex behavior, than anything I found when I was writing that article. I'm glad to see things along these lines are moving along in Second Life!