Links

• The ant is simulated by plenty of java applets in the web. Here we have some links some of the better ones: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (find this last one below Conway's applet).
• There is some non-applet software: try something for Macintosh, MS-DOS, and a Visual Basic version.
• There is some information about the old doings of Chris Langton (his ant and his cycles) in this site at the Brunel University.
• In order to provide supplementary material to the article "Further travels with my ant" (Math. Intelligencer 17, 1995), Scott Sutherland made this page. It provides not online additional material, but also some links to more ant-stuff.
• Someone put the text of Ian Stewart's article, The ultimate in anty-particles, online. Here Stewart puts the ant as an example of a world where we do know the "theory of everything", but are unable to answer some simple questions. Jack Cohen, a usual co-worker of Stewart, used the ant to illustrate the same point in this article in the online publication The Critical Rationalist.
• Serge Troubetzkoy, a mathematician at Marseille who has contributed to reveal the secrets of the ant, has a good bibliography about it.
• Some non-langtonian ants. There is a whole field of research about the algorithmical use of virtual ant colonies; it's very recent, and in rapid development. There is not much online info yet, but here you can find some.
• Not about ants at all: a page with some info about P-completeness, a subject about which we wrote somewhere else in this site.
• An educational project by A. Moreira and E. Goles made use of Langton's ant. In the sites of the 2000 and the 2001 versions, you can find further applets (several ants, to start with).

Bibliography

As we said above, the online bibliography in the page of Serge Troubetzkoy is very complete, and it has little sense to repeat it here. Hence, the following list contains the publications which we know, and that are not mentioned in his list (usually because of the publication date).

• A. Gajardo, A. Moreira, and E. Goles: Complexity of Langton's Ant. Discrete Applied Mathematics, Vol. 117, Issue 1-3, pp. 41-50 (2002).
• A. Gajardo, E. Goles, and A. Moreira: Generalized Langton's Ant: Dynamical Behavior and Complexity. In the Proceedings of 18th Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, STACS 2001, in Dresden, Germany. Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2010, edited by A. Ferreira and H. Reichel, pp. 259-270 (2001).
• A. Moreira, A. Gajardo, E. Goles: Dynamical Behavior and Complexity of Langton's Ant. Complexity, Vol. 6, N.4, pp. 46-51 (2001).
• A. Gajardo: Ph. D. Dissertation., Universidad de Chile.
• J.P. Boon: How fast does Langton's ant move?, at the arXiv.
• O. Beuret, M. Tomassini: Behaviour of Multiple Generalized Langton's Ants. In the Proceedings of the Artificial Life V Conference, ALIFE V, in Nara, Japan. Published by MIT Press (1998), edited by C. Langton and K. Shimohara. But you can also download it here.
• L. Bunimovich: Walks in Rigid Environments. Physica A, 279 (2000).
• P. Grosfils, J.P. Boon, E.G.D. Cohen, and L.Bunimovich: Propagation and Organization in Lattice Random Media. Journal of Statistical Physics, 97 (1999).

• If you want to know about the other systems known with the name of ants, and their use for optimization, the better place to start is the book by E. Bonabeau, M. Dorigo, and G. Theraulaz, Swarm Intelligence. From Natural to Artificial Systems, Oxford University Press (New York), 1999.