Stochastic Simulation of Ants That Forage By Expectation

Stochastic simulation has been used to create an artiicial colony of ants in order to study ant foraging strategies and the links between individual activity and the colony's self-organised behaviour. The ants, which forage by expectation, use a de-terministic mathematical model developed by Ol-Results indicate that ants which have either too high an expectation of patch quality and reject good quality patches thus increasing their travel costs, and those who have too low an expectation and thus feed at poor quality patches, can be shown to be acting in a sub-optimal manner.

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