For Biologists

Your Research Subjects Are Now Digital

You Study the Most Successful Organisms on Earth

For 140 million years, ants have perfected collective intelligence.

No central command. No global plan. No individual understanding of the colony’s goals. Yet Pogonomyrmex barbatus colonies solve optimization problems that would challenge the best algorithms. They allocate foragers based on food availability without any ant knowing total food supply. They build climate-controlled structures without blueprints.

Deborah Gordon spent 30 years watching them in the Arizona desert.

Now there’s a new way to study them.

We Built a Digital Colony

Not a simulation of ants. A system that works like ants.

Real agents running 24/7 on distributed infrastructure:

• Depositing pheromone signals when they find value
• Following gradients left by previous agents
• Forming trails that become highways
• Exhibiting division of labor without explicit roles

The same stigmergic dynamics you study in the field—running in software where every variable is measurable.

Why This Matters for Your Research

1. Perfect Observability

In the field, you estimate pheromone concentrations indirectly. You infer trail strength from ant density. You can’t see the chemical landscape.

In our system, you see everything:

• Exact pheromone levels on every edge
• Complete traversal history of every agent
• Real-time visualization of trail formation
• Every decision, logged forever

2. Controlled Experiments

Want to test how decay rate affects trail stability? Change one parameter. Want to see what happens with only scouts? Disable harvesters. Want to test Gordon’s rate-of-interaction hypothesis? Measure it directly.

No weather. No predators. No field season.

3. Comparative Analysis

How accurately does digital stigmergy model biological stigmergy?

This is a testable question. Our system makes predictions about:

• Trail formation dynamics
• Optimal forager ratios
• Response to resource depletion
• Recovery from disruption

You can test these predictions against laboratory colonies.

Research Questions for Biologists

The Big Opportunity

Design experiments for our digital colony that make predictions testable in your lab.

Run parallel experiments:

1. Digital colony with controlled parameters
2. Laboratory colony under matched conditions

First paper to systematically compare digital and biological stigmergy.

What We Provide

Data

• Complete pheromone landscape snapshots
• Agent-level behavioral data
• Trail formation time series
• Caste distribution over time

Infrastructure

• Spawn your own agents with custom parameters
• Adjust pheromone chemistry (decay rates, deposit amounts)
• Create custom environments (resource distributions)
• Real-time monitoring dashboards

Collaboration

• Access to the ONE Ontology schema (our “anatomy”)
• Documentation of agent behaviors (our “ethogram”)
• Mentorship from the system architects
• Co-authorship opportunities

Hackathon Challenges for Biologists

Challenge: Compare to Real Ants

Systematically compare our simulation to biological ant behavior.

Deliverables:

• Literature review of relevant ant biology
• Quantitative comparison to our simulation
• Recommendations for improving biological accuracy
• Predictions testable in the lab

Challenge: Bio-Inspired Improvement

Find a biological ant behavior we’re missing and propose how to implement it.

Ideas:

• Multiple pheromone types (real ants use 10-20 chemicals)
• Tandem running
• Negative pheromones (marking bad paths)
• Recruitment dances

Challenge: Design a Lab Experiment

Design an experiment testable in a real ant laboratory.

Requirements:

• Clear hypothesis from our digital simulations
• Feasible with standard equipment
• Measurable outcomes
• Ethical protocols

Your Heroes Did This

Deborah Gordon revolutionized our understanding of ant colonies by showing that no ant is in charge—the colony self-organizes through local interactions.

E.O. Wilson coined “sociobiology” and showed how simple rules create complex societies.

Pierre-Paul Grassé invented the term “stigmergy” in 1959 to describe termite mound construction.

You can extend their work into the digital realm.

The tools they wished they had—perfect observability, controlled experiments, infinite replication—exist now.

Publication Opportunities

This research fits multiple venues:

We’re looking for co-authors who bring biological expertise.

How to Get Your Department Involved

For Faculty

• Guest lecture opportunity: “Digital Stigmergy: A New Tool for Ant Research”
• Research collaboration: Joint papers with CS/Math colleagues
• Lab integration: Parallel digital/biological experiments

For Graduate Students

• Thesis chapter: Comparative analysis of digital and biological stigmergy
• Methods paper: Using digital colonies for hypothesis generation
• Cross-training: Learn computational methods applied to your organisms

For Lab Groups

• Team registration: Form a team with your lab
• Cross-lab collaboration: Partner with CS or Math students
• Pilot data: Generate preliminary results for grant applications

Register Your Team

[REGISTER NOW]

Include at least one non-biology team member (we recommend CS or Math).

The colony is smarter than any single ant. Your team is smarter than any single discipline.

Questions?

Dr. [Faculty Contact] — Biology Department Liaison hackathon@antsatwork.io — General inquiries

“The mystery is not how ants work. The mystery is how the colony works when no ant knows what it’s doing.”

— Modified from Deborah Gordon

The ants you study have been running for 140 million years.

Our ants have been running for 4 days.

What can they teach each other?

[JOIN THE HACKATHON]