Invasive ants are a huge problem in Australia, but a classic computer game could help solve it
abc.net.au
Australia's national science agency CSIRO and the University of Western Australia have used Age of Empires to simulate ant warfare, to figure out how to help native ant species fight their invasive counterparts.
"Ants are one of the few groups of animal species in which warfare resembles human warfare, in terms of scale and mortality," researcher Samuel Lymbery said.
Using the game, the research team built armies and battlegrounds of different sizes and shapes and watched them fight, then mapped the results.
Have they tried SimAnt?
Watch out for the antlion pits!
Oh god I'm having flashbacks, I forgot about the antlions!
The game gave me arachnophobia with the fucking close up of the spiders
Man… i loved this game… didn’t know what I was doing though
Geez… I am old
Well that’s a unique way of doing it, but seems like it’s working so why the hell not. I wonder if AOE4 would produce better results? The images look like AOE2, but it only says AOE. I guess AOE2 is the real original one in everyone’s mind lol
They actually used AoE2, fwiw. It's debatable whether the game was actually helpful when they also ran tests with actual ants or if they're just (very successfully) using the gimmick for publicity.
It would probably be better if they could simplify the game down to just circles with the same unit AI. And then they could have various environments programmed as drawn in like water, vegetation, and what not. Don’t know if that would change anything, but they could probably simulate larger group dynamics with this.
I always liked Empire Earth...
What’s this? A videogame for ants?
Kinda dissapointed its not SimAnt. Then again, maybe that had the wrong goals. Still, you trade bodies with the spider and go to town on those other ants.