I only had time for a small amount of work on the Web Critters project last week, however the change that I implemented had dramatic and unexpected ramifications for the state of the simulation. On Monday and Tuesday I implemented the notion of a corpse into the simulation logic.  Instead of simply disappearing when they run out of resources, agents now leave behind a corpse object containing resources equal to the genetic material that was locked away in their tags.  (At present, offence, defence, and exchange.)  Once fully consumed, corpses are removed from the environment, just like any other resource [... read the rest ...]

Development on the Web Critters project has been rolling along briskly these past few weeks, with the brunt of the work having shifted from perfecting the abstractions to ironing out kinks in the algorithms and observing how the system behaves in very early trials. The results have been fascinating and have proved that even a level two ECHO simulation (attack + defense) can exhibit a startling amount of intelligence. As I’ve run different interactions of the Web Critters code, I have turned to observing the behaviors of the agents that evolve to point towards weaknesses in my simulation.  The process [... read the rest ...]