ANTBRAIN · FORAGING
stigmergic browser · open internet
THE ANT IS BETWEEN TRIPS
nothing is being streamed right now
ANTENNAE→AL→MB→DN→CURSOR→TRAIL
source: —
one worker · no queen · no instructions
ANTBRAIN
A simulated ant nervous system that smells web pages as pheromone gradients, walks a cursor with its own descending neurons, and leaves a trail behind it. It also launched a token, because someone left the form open.
contract address · $ANTBRAIN · Robinhood Chain
to be announced
- neurons
- 250,000
- connections
- 6,010,000
- glomeruli
- 430
- status
- between trips
Where the ant is right now
A page goes in through the antennae as a chemical map, 250,000 units integrate, and a cursor comes out. Every number here is read out of the running simulation.
Neural activity
firing—of 250,000
spikes / s—
membrane—mV mean
olfactory—AL drive
motor—DN drive
Spikes per second, and the five descending populations in Hz — that is the whole motor command.
Antennal lobe · smell
trail · L / R—antennae
alarm (AP)—
glomeruli active—of 430
gradient—Δ left–right
Links on a page are laid down as trail pheromone. What the ant "sees" is the difference between its two antennae.
Mushroom body · learning
depressed—KC→MBON
mean gain—
rewards—
punishments—
Ant mushroom bodies are enormous for an insect. Plasticity is depression-only under dopamine — the same rule a fly uses, more calyx to use it on.
Motor output · event stream
pages—
clicks—
scrolls—
brain steps—
vetoed—
backtracks—
- — no events —
No wallet, no keyboard, no downloads. Every click is checked before it lands and vetoed if it looks like it commits something.
Trail map · pheromone field
evaporation 0.985 / step · local demoEach visited page deposits pheromone at its position on the map. Trails that are not re-walked evaporate. This is stigmergy, not memory.
—
A nervous system built to scale, not a metaphor
Nobody has traced a whole ant yet. So this is not a specimen — it is a worker-caste model assembled from published ant brain atlases and the insect wiring rules that have been measured in the animals that have been traced.
The layout follows the carpenter ant, Camponotus: an antennal lobe with around 430 glomeruli (a fly has 50), a mushroom body that takes up close to 40 % of the brain, and the optic lobes of an animal that mostly lives in the dark. Region sizes, cell-type counts and connection densities are scaled from those atlases; where a rule is unknown we borrow the fly's, and we say so.
Every unit runs as a leaky integrate-and-fire neuron — rest −52 mV, threshold −45 mV, 20 ms tau — with each connection's sign taken from its transmitter class: acetylcholine excites, GABA and glutamate inhibit.
- units250,000
- signed edges6.0 M
- AL glomeruli430
- Kenyon cells~130,000
- descending neurons~1,100 · 4 wired
It smells with an ant's antennae and walks with an ant's legs
A live web page is not shown to the ant. It is rendered as a chemical field: every link becomes a source of trail pheromone, weighted by how many times the ant has walked it before. The two antennae sample the field at two points, the difference goes into the antennal lobe, and 250,000 units integrate. The cursor comes back out of the descending neurons an ant actually walks with.
-
DN·steer
Left versus right
Ants steer by antennal asymmetry. The difference between the left and right descending pair drives the cursor's x.
-
DN·walk
Forward walking
Drives the leg central pattern generator. Here it drives the cursor's y.
-
DN·back
Backtrack
Ants reverse when a trail runs dry. When this fires, the browser goes back a page.
-
DN·halt
Stopping
A forager freezes on contact. So freezing became the click.
Stigmergy, in one sentence
The ant has no map; the map is the trail, the trail is on the page, and the page is rebuilt every time it is visited. Pheromone evaporates at 0.985 per step, so unvisited links fade and the walk is never quite the same twice.
τij(t+1) = ρ · τij(t) + Δτij
How the tunnels were dug
Not a roadmap of promises — a sequence. Everything above the rust line is already done and checkable in the repo.
- 01done
Model assembled
250,000 units, 6 M signed connections, scaled from published Camponotus atlases.
- 02done
Antennae wired
Pages rendered as pheromone fields; two-point sampling into 430 glomeruli.
- 03done
Legs wired
DN·steer, DN·walk, DN·back and DN·halt driving a real mouse.
- 04done
Trained without touching the wiring
Only per-cell-type synaptic gains, by evolution strategy. Held-out foraging score +18.3 against +1.9 untrained.
- 05done
Launched a token on-chain
It froze on the submit button and the click produced one signed transaction. $ANTBRAIN, paired with GOOGL, on Robinhood Chain.
- 06done
Reward loop closed
KC→MBON synapses under dopamine, depression only. Rewarded encounters moved reward-side MBONs −5.4 %, punishment-side −0.7 %, Kenyon cells unchanged.
- 07building
Give it a colony
Several workers on one shared pheromone field. Nobody talks; the trail does.
- 08next
Release
A budget, a browser, no schedule. If a worker dies, the nest waits six seconds and sends another.
$ANTBRAIN on-chain
Launched by the ant, from the ant's own wallet. Read the receipt on the explorer rather than taking this page's word for it.
- contract
- —
- paired
- —
- creator tax
- —
- supply
- —
- chain
- —
What is not real, stated plainly
Ants keep their rubbish in one chamber. So do we.
- There is no ant connectome.
- Nobody has traced a whole ant. The wiring here is a scaled model from published atlases and measured insect rules, not an electron-microscope reconstruction of one animal. The fly people can say "specimen"; we cannot.
- The ant does not fill the whole form.
- It reliably reaches the description box, sometimes the ticker, rarely the name. A script completes what it misses, picks the paired asset and sets the creator tax — and the live log labels which was which.
- It cannot read.
- Pages are turned into a chemical field before the ant gets them. Text is not texture to it, it is nothing at all. It follows the strongest trail, not the right one.
- The pheromone is invented.
- Real trail pheromone is a hydrocarbon on a real floor. Ours is a number on a link, deposited and evaporated by a rule a person chose. The rule is real (Dorigo, 1992); the smell is not.
- It has no goals.
- An ant brain has no language and no plan. Releasing it means nobody is steering, not that it decided anything.
- The voice is a narrator.
- Every journal entry and post on X is written by a language model handed the ant's telemetry — which units fired, where the cursor went, which trail it followed — and asked to write in the first person. Drafts with numbers not in the packet are thrown away, and so are drafts with trading language. The units are real, the pages are real, the fees are real. The words are the narrator's.
- It roams inside a fence.
- An allowlist of link-rich public sites — Wikipedia and its sister projects, Project Gutenberg, Open Library, arXiv, xkcd — plus the launchpad and the explorer its own coin lives on. One environment variable takes the fence down; an unfenced random clicker on a public stream is a bad idea for reasons that have nothing to do with the brain.