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please read how real ants avoid traffic jams between flows - they just make ants carrying food turn slightly less degrees when they encounter another ant. it works beautifully to split the flows!

Accidentally read the thumbnail as AUTISM 2

I think maybe ants carrying food should always act like followers? The foodless ants should be the only ones finding new paths!

Real ants also have distinct roles. Some of the main ones are explorers/scouts (who find new food) and foragers (who transport food back to the nest). You should consider sticking to the conventional naming scheme!

Also, I think the workers of at least some colonies change their role depending on how many specimen of the roles they have recently encountered. This helps the colony rebalance—for example, if a predator removes some ants. I believe implementing a similar mechanism could improve the performance of your simulation:
1. It would make explorers venture from established routes, increasing the chance of connecting them.
2. It would also encourage explorers to return home after some time, linking their exploration markers with those of other ants and making new paths more likely to form.

6:03 Ants can't just pick up their marks irl. What they do to get arround this is that they release another scent. When they detect this scent more strongly than the original one they preceive the path as old. In this case this could be simulated as another grid and you just compare the two.

Ants can dig, let them dig.

Try making the ants walk down gradient of the red pheromone when colliding with many ants, unless they find a food trail pheromone. It doesn't look like they do that at 17:12. That could speed up initial exploration in the maze. It simulates "it's crowded, let me explore"

Explorer ants should be able to leave a marker of “No Food Here”

I’m not sure exactly what conditions they’d be set with, but it would be cool

I love this project, it just keeps getting better.

I was wondering what it could be like if there was a set chance for a food chunk to spawn when an ant collects food.
Ants could then work together to moke that chunk, and it cannot be moved by one ant alone.

3:36 youtube compression really likes this

11:11 WHY DOES IT LOOK LIKE A COFFIE BEAN 🤣

4:13 not sure yet if you do something like this  yet as im still watching, but one of the big slow downs before this was ants bunching up when blobs of yellow and red meet head on. A simple way to ease this might be to make it when red and yellow ants meet they naturally turn to one side or the other, "keep to the right" sort of thing just to keep the main flow of ants separated.

I'm looking forward to seeing dynamic obstacles in the next update. Maybe even digger ants?

i think every ants sampling should degrade the pheremones a little

that would automatically lead to more exploration around popular paths

and persistent curves would straighten out faster

you could still keep a sampling frequency distribution over the population, maybe a normal dist, not two groups

I have an idea for congestion control. When an ant is blocked by other ants, it should release a congestion phermone which makes other ants avoid the area, but ants that are carrying food will be more likely to choose the left path and those carrying no food more likely to go right. this way, they can form ant streets with separated traffic directions like in real life.

I liked how the followers and explorers used to improve the adaptability can be linked to natural selection or the evolution of ideas in culture. The ones with a less common but excellent trait influence the ones that follow the more successful traits and allow them all to evolve.

1:58 major game dev employees in the chat are foaming at the mouth hearing that.

The red color isn't bright enough, and the video bitrate completely washes them out against the grey background :( the yellow ants look great though!

I love the idea of a social stomach interaction when a yellow explorer meets a red explorer!