When it is implemented, you will be as a minor deity, able to set Sugarscape's parameters according to your slightest whim. Until then, you'll have to settle for our home movies. These depictions of Sugarscape in action are in the QuickTime format, which is available for Mac, Windows and Unix. Each period each agent searches its neighborhood for the site richest is sugar, moves there and harvests the sugar. Sugar grows back at unit rate.
Agents die if they are unable to find enough food to satisfy their metabolic demands.
Eventually, population pressures mount, the tribes are forced onto less fertile land, and they begin to interact. Bilateral exchange in a spatially-distributed population of agents may fail to produce a Pareto optimal allocation when agents also engage in production and consumption. This is demonstrated by this movie, in which aggregate supply and demand schedules are plotted together with actual average trade price and total trade quantity for exchange between Sugarscape agents, animated over time. Red nodes are sick, blue nodes are healthy, and lines between nodes indicate that one of the agents has caught a disease from the other. If you would like a full set of animations to Growing Artificial Societies , they are available on CD-ROM .