As I'm sure you know, the solution involves changing the code. This is the sort of thing that comes up all the time in this problem: your own code doesn't produce the result you want. In this case it's not all your own code, but you know what I mean.

The challenge is to figure out why the ants act the way they do and then change the code so that they stop doing what you don't want them to do and start doing what you do want them to do.

This is always the programmer's challenge: why doesn't your code do what you want. Since it's your code, who better to answer that question but you! It's fine to discuss problems and issues, but ultimately, each person must take responsibility for what his/her code does and not treat it as a mystery. After all, you wrote it.

I don't mean the preceding to sound harsh. I simply want to take this opportunity to point out that one reason this is a difficult problem is that it produces these kinds of results very often. Your own code (or code that you have taken ownership of) doesn't do what you thought you wrote it to do. Yet you wrote it (or adopted it).  How can it be that it doesn't do what you said? Yet there it is.

The answer is that in this problem more than in most, your code interacts with its environment. With most of the code you have written in your career pretty much all you had to worry about was what the code itself did. In this problem you have to worry not only about what the code does but also about how the code changes its environment and how that change effects the objects that the code controls.