Simple rules.
Complex behavior. Emergence.
A single ant is almost stupid. A colony of ten thousand ants — same brain, no boss, no plan, no blueprint — builds a structured city underground with brood chambers, food stores, waste dumps, and ventilation, all in the right places. This lab takes the lid off and lets you watch the city grow.
Dundee, Omaha · Sunday
§1.1What's in here
Tab 02 · The Nest opens up a labeled cross-section of an ant nest — brood chamber, food storage, midden, foraging tunnels, surface mound — and compares Kelly's two species side by side. Tab 03 · The Dig is the simulation. Set your variables (species, moisture, soil, temperature, food, colony size), hit play, and watch them tunnel in real time. The chambers emerge from the workers' individual decisions — nobody plans them. Tab 04 · Emergence runs the same parameters twelve times. Twelve different nests. That's the Thompson family's whole thesis in one screen.
§1.2Easter eggs from the spiral notebooks
This is a teaching lab built around an agent-based simulation. Each ant on screen is a tiny program following a few rules — move toward a tunnel boundary, prefer digging downward, deposit food near existing food, tend the brood at the thermal optimum. The chambers, spirals, and overall nest shape are not drawn by the code. They emerge from the rules. That is the entire point.
Numbers and species-specific behaviors are simplified from real myrmecology literature. Real ant nests are wildly more sophisticated — three-dimensional, with ventilation engineering, fungus gardens (in leafcutters), seed milling stations (in harvesters), and species-specific architectures we are only beginning to map with X-ray tomography. If this lab makes you want to learn more, Mark Moffett's "Adventures Among Ants" is where to start.
§1.3Notation
Through the lab: brood is the chamber containing eggs, larvae, and pupae — the most carefully tended and thermally optimal location. food storage is where foragers deposit returning food — often spiraling around the brood. midden is the trash dump, always kept far from the brood. queen sits at the center of the brood chamber. pheromone trails are invisible to humans but everything to the colony.
The Nest · anatomy of underground architecture
No two ant nests look identical, but they all have the same parts. Once you know what to look for, you can read a cross-section the way an archaeologist reads a dig site.
Select species
Cross-section · labeled
Parts of the nest
The mound & entrance. A pile of excavated soil ringing one or more openings. The entrance is the bottleneck — guards stand here, foragers traffic in and out, debris gets ejected. Lasius makes the classic crater-shaped anthill you see on sidewalks. Atta has a single massive entrance crater up to a meter wide.
Foraging tunnels. Roughly vertical near the surface, branching outward as they go deeper. Width is matched to body size — about 1.5 to 2 worker-widths. Wide enough for two-way traffic, narrow enough to defend.
Brood chamber. Where the eggs, larvae, and pupae are kept. The most carefully tended location in the colony. Workers actively move the brood vertically to chase the thermal optimum — colder surface temps push the brood deeper. The queen is here.
Food storage. Returning foragers deposit food where workers can access it later. In Formica species the food often arranges in a logarithmic spiral around the brood — an emergent geometric solution to "drop near food, but never inside the brood."
Midden / trash. Dead workers, undigestible remains, fungus mat in leafcutters. Always far from the brood, often near the entrance for ejection.
Queen chamber. Center of the brood chamber. In most species there's exactly one. The queen does nothing but lay eggs; she doesn't direct anything. The colony's "intelligence" lives nowhere — it lives in the interactions.
↗ Roadmap · v0.1 and beyond
v0.1 3D rotating cross-section · drag to orbit, slice plane to cut through.
v0.2 Real species-architecture data from Tschinkel's casting work (he pours plaster into nests and excavates the casts).
v0.3 Termite mound comparison — different evolution, similar emergent solutions to ventilation.
v1.0 X-ray tomography overlay for real-nest comparison.
The Dig · live agent-based simulation
Set the variables. Hit play. Watch the chambers emerge. Nobody draws them — they arise from the workers' individual decisions, applied a few thousand times.
The colony
The substrate
§3.1The dig in progress
What you're watching
Each yellow dot is one worker following a few rules: move toward an unexcavated boundary, prefer digging downward, carry dirt back to the surface mound, follow pheromone trails laid by other workers, never tunnel into a chamber already designated for brood. The pheromone field (faint green wash) reinforces successful dig routes — that's how main highways emerge.
The brood chamber emerges where workers cluster to tend the queen and her eggs — at the thermal optimum depth, which moves with the surface temperature slider. The food storage emerges from returning foragers depositing food near existing deposits while avoiding the brood. Watch the food chambers in Formica colonies — they tend to wind around the brood in a slow spiral.
↗ Roadmap · v0.1 and beyond
v0.1 Click to drop food crumbs · watch foragers find and recruit.
v0.2 Click to drop a predator stimulus · watch defensive behavior emerge.
v0.3 Seasonal cycle · winter cluster deep, spring expansion.
v0.4 Vibration sensor (Kelly's discovery) · seismic input shifts digging direction toward source.
v1.0 3D nest with rotating cross-section · same simulation, third dimension visible.
Emergence · twelve colonies, same rules
Set the parameters, hit run, and the simulation builds twelve colonies in parallel with identical inputs. The rules are the same. The starting conditions are the same. The outcomes are not. That is what emergence looks like.
Shared inputs
Run the experiment
Each thumbnail below shows an independent colony with identical inputs but different random seeds. Look for: where the brood chamber settled, where food storage emerged, whether tunnels branched east or west, how deep they pushed. Same rules, no two outcomes alike.
§4.1The twelve colonies
What you're seeing
This is the Thompson family's whole methodology in one screen. Same species. Same colony size. Same soil. Same temperature. The rules each ant follows are identical in every panel. And yet — twelve different nests. Different depths. Different branching patterns. Different chamber placements.
This is also why ant colonies are so robust. There is no single right answer that the colony has to find. There are many valid solutions to "build a viable nest in these conditions," and the simple rules find one of them every time, robustly, without ever needing to know which one. The colony doesn't optimize toward a blueprint — it satisfices toward viability.
The same logic explains why Mom's markets, Jenny's crowds, Dad's lint, and Kelly's ants all look like the same kind of system. None of them have a designer. All of them are stable. All of them are slightly different every time. Emergence.
↗ Roadmap · v0.1 and beyond
v0.1 Click any thumbnail to view its full-resolution time-lapse.
v0.2 Side-by-side comparison panel · pick any two outcomes to study differences.
v0.3 Statistical overlay · all 12 nests rendered transparently on top of each other to show the consensus shape.
v0.4 Parameter sweep · vary one input across the 12 runs to see sensitivity.
v1.0 Cross-system emergence — same engine, different agents — for Jenny's crowds, Dad's lint fibers, Mom's markets. Watch the same statistics rules generate stadium ovations, lint patterns, and market crashes.