When they eventually find the food source, they try to get home by tending to follow the pheromone path and leaving beacon trail behind. The pheromone and the beacon evaporates over time. This model was developed in part to study the technical details needed to develop our simulation environment , but it was also very useful in understanding the concept of stigmergy. On the right there is a series of screenshots presented from one typical run of the simulation. The food source is represented by the blue dots in the upper left corner of the space.
Ants looking for food are the white, while ants carrying food are the green dots on the screen.
The screeanshots are divided into too parts, one of them showing the concentrate of pheromone , another showing that of the baecon . Note however, that this run was not perfect in the sense that a number of ants remained off the path built by the others. This is one of the core models of the concept of stigmergy, and in broader sense that of decentralized self-organizing systems. It is fairly similar to Deneubourg's Model of Breed Sorting Ants . The model was used to gain deeper understanding of the concept and also to study the underlying coordination behavior.