antsim

A GPU-first ant-colony artificial life simulator skeleton in Rust.

Current shape

The first milestone is deliberately lean:

• dense GPU-resident ant state
• table-driven species and colony parameters
• per-colony pheromone layers in ping-pong textures
• atomic fixed-point deposit accumulation
• GPU compute passes for ant update, diffusion/evaporation, and render-instance generation
• a minimal realtime viewer with pheromone background + instanced ant triangles

Module map

src/
  app.rs                 native window loop and frame orchestration
  scenario.rs            default scenario authoring
  sim/
    config.rs            public authoring types
    gpu_types.rs         host-shareable GPU structs
    reference.rs         tiny CPU reference kernels + tests
  gpu/
    mod.rs               GPU simulation owner
  render/
    mod.rs               minimal ant + pheromone renderer
  telemetry/
    mod.rs               coarse frame stats
shaders/
  agent_update.wgsl
  diffuse_evaporate.wgsl
  build_instances.wgsl
  render.wgsl

Running

cargo run --release

The repository was created around wgpu 29.x APIs. The initial scenario starts one colony with several thousand ants and a static food patch so that the simulation has visible structure immediately.