TITLE Formicarium — Notes on a Colony PROMPT A simulation of an ant colony foraging, presented as a naturalist's field notebook spread: the ants run across the paper itself, between pencil sketches and handwritten notes, laying pheromone trails that appear as faint washes of ink which strengthen into roads. The viewer places crumbs of food and obstacles and watches the colony discover, recruit, optimise and re-route. Concept: emergent intelligence as marginalia; a living page. Mood: patient observation, summer afternoon, quiet delight. Palette: notebook paper #F2EAD3 (with ruled feint lines, a centre gutter shadow, a coffee ring and a pressed leaf), sepia ink #2B2118 for ants, sketches and handwriting, rust-red #A44A3F for the food pheromone wash, annotations and the queen's mark, moss green #5B7B5A for the home pheromone wash and leaf fragments. Light page. Simulation (Canvas 2D): 600–1,500 ants (scaled to device) as agents with position, heading and state (searching / returning with food). Two pheromone fields on a coarse grid (typed arrays): "home" pheromone laid by searching ants leaving the nest, "food" pheromone laid by ants carrying food, both evaporating and diffusing slowly. Each ant senses three points ahead (left, centre, right) for the pheromone it is seeking (searchers follow food pheromone; carriers follow home pheromone), steers toward the strongest with some randomness, wanders when it senses nothing, avoids obstacles and page edges, picks up a crumb on reaching food and turns around, drops it at the nest and turns again. From this, trails emerge within seconds of a food discovery, tighten from meanders into near-straight lines, and re-form when blocked. Render pheromones as soft watercolour-like stains on the paper (rust for food trails, green for home trails) using a low-resolution field upscaled with smoothing and multiplied onto the paper, so busy routes become rich ink roads with feathered edges; render ants as tiny three-segment bodies with legs suggested by a two-frame alternating stroke and antennae, oriented along their heading, carriers holding a visible pale crumb or leaf fragment in their jaws; at the nest entrance (a drawn hole with a crater of soil grains) ants disappear and emerge. The notebook: left page mostly "written": a title in careful handwriting-style italic (Georgia/Palatino italic, slightly irregular baseline via per-word rotation): "Formicarium: notes on a colony of Lasius-like garden ants, kept under glass", dated entries, a pencil sketch of an ant in dorsal view with labelled parts (head, mesosoma, petiole, gaster, antenna: correct basic anatomy) drawn in SVG line work with hatching, a small diagram of the two-pheromone rule in three steps, and a tally table that updates live in the writer's hand: "crumbs carried home: 214 · ants out: 630 · longest road: 41 cm". The right page is the open arena where most activity happens, but ants roam across both pages, walk around the sketch and over the handwriting. A ribbon bookmark, page number "37", and a pencil lying across the corner (an obstacle the ants path around). Interaction: click/tap to drop a sugar crumb pile (a cluster of pale granules; each pile holds a finite number of loads and dwindles visibly as it is carried away, then the trail to it fades); drag to draw a pencil line that becomes an obstacle wall (thick graphite stroke; ants treat it as impassable and find the gap or the long way round); a rubber eraser tool removes walls or wipes pheromone (a puddle also washes scent away) (rub out a trail and watch confusion, then recovery: the signature moment: a strong road is cut, ants pile up and scatter, scouts feel their way around, and within half a minute a new road is inked in by the colony); a "drop of water" tool makes a temporary puddle they avoid; a magnifying glass (hold Shift or a toggle) shows a 4× lens with individual ants in detail, antennae waving, exchanging food mouth to mouth when two meet (a brief pause). Controls drawn as items clipped to the notebook edge: sugar spoon, pencil, eraser, pipette, loupe, with handwritten labels; speed (×1, ×3) as a marginal note the viewer taps. Annotations that write themselves: when notable events happen, a short pencil note appears beside them in the margin with a hand-drawn arrow, written out stroke-like (clip reveal left to right): "first scout finds it: 0:14", "road established", "they have abandoned the long way", "traffic jam at the gap". An "Observations" list on the left page accumulates these with timestamps like a real field log. Entrance: the notebook lies open; one crumb pile is already on the right page; ants pour out of the nest hole in a fan and within the first three seconds the first few have reached the food and a faint rust line starts to appear. Typography: handwriting italic for notes, a typewriter face for the pasted specimen label ("COLONY 3 · collected under a paving stone · queen marked red"), tiny printed notebook maker's text in the corner. Reduced motion: ants move at one-third speed with trails pre-established; notes appear without writing animation. Performance: fields at ~160×100 resolution, ants in typed arrays, one path batch per state, DPR capped at 2; pause when hidden. Keyboard: tools selectable with 1–5; arrow keys move a placement cursor, Enter drops. DESCRIPTION An open field notebook lies on a dark wooden desk. The left page is written up in a sepia italic hand: a title, two dated entries, a labelled pencil sketch of a worker ant from above, a three-step diagram of the two-scent rule, a live tally and an "Observations" log. The right page is the arena, with a pasted typewritten specimen label, a pressed lime leaf, a coffee ring, a ribbon in the gutter and a green pencil lying across the corner. Up to 1,500 ants pour from a drawn nest hole in a fan, find the waiting sugar within seconds, and stain the paper with green home-scent and rust food-scent that thickens into roads. The viewer adds sugar, draws graphite walls, rubs out roads, drops water and inspects individuals under a 4x loupe, while red-pencil notes with arrows write themselves beside notable events and are entered in the log with timestamps. VISUAL TECHNIQUES - Canvas 2D agent simulation with ants held in typed arrays and two pheromone fields on a coarse grid with evaporation and diffusion - Pheromone fields painted to a low-resolution canvas, upscaled with smoothing and blur, and multiplied onto the paper as watercolour stains with per-cell granulation - Ants drawn in batched paths as three-segment bodies with two-frame alternating legs, antennae and carried crumbs or leaf fragments - Notebook built from CSS: feint ruled lines, margin rule, gutter shadow, stitched thread, stacked page edges, cloth cover, ribbon and a CSS pencil that is a real obstacle - Inline SVG line work with turbulence displacement for hand-drawn wobble: ant anatomy sketch with hatching, coffee ring, pressed leaf, tool drawings - SVG fractal-noise paper grain multiplied over the spread - Per-word rotation and slight paragraph tilts for a handwritten baseline; typewriter face for the specimen label; tiny printed maker's text - Self-writing annotations revealed left to right with clip-path, with arrows drawn by stroke-dash animation - A loupe that magnifies the real page (a scaled clone of the sheet) with a separate detailed ant renderer showing jointed legs, waving antennae and mouth-to-mouth food exchange - Reduced-motion mode: one-third speed with trails pre-established and notes shown without writing animation INTERACTION MODEL Five tools are slipped under an elastic strap on the notebook edge and can be chosen by click, tap or keys 1-5. The sugar spoon drops a finite pile of granules that dwindles as it is carried off. The pencil is dragged to draw graphite walls the ants cannot cross. The rubber erases walls and wipes scent, so a cut road dissolves into confusion before the colony inks in a new one. The pipette leaves a temporary puddle that blocks ants and washes scent away. The loupe (or holding Shift) shows a 4x lens following the pointer. A marginal note switches the watching speed between x1 and x3. Arrow keys move a placement mark on the page and Enter uses the current tool there (for the pencil, Enter lowers and lifts the point); Escape dismisses the mark. The tally and the Observations log update continuously from what the colony actually does.