The simulation tracks idealised “ants” moving inside a unit square. Each ant travels at unit speed in a straight line until it collides with another ant’s path, another ant, or the boundary. Collisions are perfectly elastic: the velocity vector is reflected across the line of impact, so the ant continues with the same speed but a mirrored direction.

Instead of advancing all ants in fixed time steps, the engine jumps directly between future collision events. For every ant we keep its current position, start time, velocity, and the list of straight-line segments it has already traversed. Whenever an event occurs, a new segment is recorded and the ant’s state updates to the collision point.

Controls & Parameters

• Step / Run: Advance a single event or continuously progress until you stop or no further events exist.
• Density: Number of ants generated at reset. When “Symmetric” is enabled, each base ant is paired with another starting at the same position but moving in the opposite direction.
• Reset: Stop any active run and rebuild a fresh initial configuration using the current parameters.
• mind: Minimum average length for the last m segments of an ant. If the average drops below this value, the ant becomes inactive and no longer participates in new collisions.
• m: Number of recent segments to average when checking the deactivation rule.
• Symmetric: Spawn mirrored ants to reveal symmetric patterns.
• Export SVG: Download the current state with selectable layers: active/inactive ants, stored segments, boundary frame, and the current in-flight paths.
• Zoom: Use the mouse wheel over the square to zoom in/out; the view stays within the unit bounds.