The purpose of this project is to explore the effects of the number of ants in a colony and the distance from the food source on the amount of food returned to the hill. To do this, created a computer simulation of the foraging techniques used by common ants. In the end I found that the number of ants greatly affects the amount of food returned to the as well as the distance. The most favorable colony situation would be a colony with a large number of ants close to a source of food.
I created the simulation using Dark Basic v.1.12. I used Dark Basic because it provides simple way to create a 3-D environment. I programmed in "pheromones" that act very similarly to how they do in real life. Pheromones are chemicals that ants use to guide each other to food sources. This allowed for trails to be created on the terrain that many ants would follow.
I found that more ants would make the number of food "units" delivered rise exponentially, so there were more units of food delivered per capita. Also, I found that a close distance to the nest from the food meant that food units delivered would increase immensely. I was able to conclude that a nest with many ants is more favorable than one with few. nest that is closer to the food will also be much more efficient than one that is far.