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People and energy guide

BehaviourComposer: ignore everything before this.

This guide aims to help you construct a model where people interact with the environment and each other. The guide is structured a story with a number of chapters where you will gradually build up a narrative where the environment changes and the agents adapt. The story aims to encourage you to think about how people behave within an environment where resources are finite, and particularly on how the agents interact with each other with respect to how publicly information about themselves and the environment is shared. At the end of the guide you are encouraged to build your own micro-behaviours that give agents the kinds of behaviours you think are realistic. It is important to remember that complex systems can be highly sensitive to small perturbations, therefor we must not over-simplify how we model people.

The environment and simple agents

to create a model we will assume a simple script that agents use as they live in the model:
  1. scan: look around and store information about the environment and other agents
  2. move: decide which patch to move to (if at all)
  3. consume: take energy
  4. think: manage funds
  5. interact: agents punish/bribe based on linked agent(s) energy consumption
  6. influence: the outcome of the interaction means winner influences loser e.g. change their attributes
as we build these agents and the environment we will add behaviours that annotate the model as it runs in the applet view e.g. show how rich an agent is

Agents get more sophisticated

The energy in the environment dramatically decreases

The agents adapt again

Make your own agents


BehaviourComposer: ignore everything after this.