Pathfinding? Simplified

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swennn

in General Discussion • Other • 1 year ago

I'm pretty new to processing but have decent java experience. My first project I wanted to make is a small Ant ecosystem/ simulator. I want to know a few things:

I want to make multiple objects of the class Ant, an object of the class Anthill and an object of the class Food. What I want is that the An object choose to walk the closest route from Anthill to food... And wait when there is no food in the world. Is this possible? And how is it done? I figured something like drawing a line between anthill and food and let the Ants walk that... I have no idea how to implement this tough.

Replies(5)

jas0501

Re: Pathfinding? Simplified

1 year ago

You would have a more realistic model if you added pheromone object and a grid. This would permit modeling behavior of ants moving in a semi-random direction, unless some pheromone scent or food was detected, and discovering the food source while leaving a trail home. As they return home with food they refresh the trail, permitting other ants to follow.

Ants could sense the pheromone one cell away in NW, N and NE direction and move to the cell with the strongest scent.. The strength of the scent in a cell would fade over time, but could be added to by other ants traveling the path.

You should be able to search the web and find numerous papers on modeling ant behavior.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms

asimes

Re: Pathfinding? Simplified

1 year ago

If you really are interested in shortest path for pathfinding (this is not what ants do though) then look into Dijkstra's algorithm.

swennn

Re: Pathfinding? Simplified

1 year ago

Haha yeah true to that. But since its my first project I would like to start of simple... I was wondering if this can be done without grid? How to construct multiple objects of Ant without naming them al.. and still displaying(Im very new to graphical programming, only have done terminal programming with java).. How would that work?

PhiLho

Re: Pathfinding? Simplified

1 year ago

" How to construct multiple objects of Ant without naming them al"
Put them in an ArrayList.

quarks

Re: Pathfinding? Simplified

1 year ago

Since you are familiar with Java but not so familiar with path finding you might find this library useful. It allows you to define your own navigation graph in terms of nodes and edges and then allows you choose from 4 different path finding algorithms to find a route between any two nodes.

Example using path finding library.

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