Painted Desert Challenge Anna Temple-West

What it is This model is based on the Termites. Set of simple rules that results in them moving all of the wood chips into a single pile. Dimension of multiple types (colors) of wood chips. The challenge get the termites to sort each chip type into its own pile

How It Works Each termite starts wandering randomly. If it bumps into a wood chip, it picks the chip up, and continues to wander randomly. When it bumps into another wood chip of that color, it finds a nearby empty space and puts its wood chip down. With these simple rules, the woodchips eventually end up in piles sorted by color.

Observations As piles of wood chips begin to form, the piles are not "protected" in any way. That is, termites sometimes take chips away from existing piles. That strategy might seem counter-productive. If piles were “protected" that would result in smaller piles, instead of numerous bigger piles.

Sliders SETUP button to set up the termites (white) and wood chips (all other colors). GO button to start the simulation. A termite that is carrying a wood chip turns the color of the chip. The NUMBER slider controls the number of termites. * Changes in the NUMBER slider do not take effect until the next setup.) The DENSITY slider controls the initial density of wood chips. The SIM-DELAY slider can be used to slow down the speed of the simulation. The PILES slider allows the user sets the number of different chip typesi.e., the number of different piles to be made).

Colors Red, Orange, Grey, Yellow, Brown, Purple, Magenta, Blue, Light Blue, Dark Blue, Pink, Teal, Dark Green & Lime Green.

Setup 1 Standard Setup Number 250 Density 45% Color 8 Time was not too long to collect the woodchips because there numerous termites working together

Setup 2 Number 400 Density 9% Color 12 The piles were smaller because of the density change smaller percent

Setup 3 Number 75 Density 99% Color 3 Piles are even larger because the density is so high and the amount of termites is much less than the first two tries.

Setup 4 Number 400 Density 99% Color 14 Piles closer together, it took longer for the piles to form

Setup 5 Number 4 Density 4% Color 2 Only 1 pile even with 2 colors set. The grey chips were never touched by either of the 2 termites. They kept moving the reds, but never touched the grey ones. Ran it 2 more times after.

Observation to Setup 5 First time ran for approx. 5 minutes grey was still never moved Red piled moved all over the place Set it up again, and got 5 piles. 4 piles of grey and 1 pile of red. After a few minutes it changed to 2 piles of grey and still 1 pile of red. Ran it once more and got 2 piles of red and 1 pile of grey.

Citation - Wilensky, U. (1997). NetLogo Painted Desert Challenge model. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/PaintedDesertChallenge. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. - Wilensky, U. (1999). NetLogo. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.