This reminds me of Rich Hickey's Clojure Concurrency talk[1], where he uses a simulation of an ant colony to explain Clojure's concurrency features. Hickey's version[2] is a lot simpler, but remains an interesting starting point if you want to hack on something similar.

[1] http://blip.tv/file/812787

[2] http://clojure.googlegroups.com/web/ants.clj?gda=T0C_CjoAAAD...