Animal Simulations with *Logo: Massive Parallelism for the Masses

Experimentation with animal simulations is limited, in large part, by the difficulty of converting ethological ideas into computer programs. *Logo is a new progranuning language that aims to make it easier for non-expert programmers (researchers as well as students) to develop and modify their own simulations. *Logo is designed specially for simulating colony-level behaviors-that is, group behaviors that emerge from interactions among hundreds or thousands of individual creatures. Unlike most simulation languages, *Logo gives the creatures' environment an equal computational status to the creatures themselves. Users write rules for creatures and for “patches” of the environment, then observe the higher-level behaviors that result. A sample *Logo program shows how local, parallel actions among ants can lead to spatialextended and temporally-sequential patterns in the colony-level behavior.