Swarm is designed to ease the process of simulating large numbers of in teracting Ragents,S where agents could be insects, economic agents, vehicles, or almost anything. Certain features of Swarm have been designed expressly with this village formation model in mind, as the SFI Swarm team believes it poses in a particularly clear fashion design problems whose solution would be useful for other researchers as well. Swarm has been under development at SFI for three years, but beginning in Spring 1994 development quickened with the dedication of new programmers funded by the Advanced Research Projects Administration. Space does not allow a detailed description of the structure of Swarm, and indeed, it is designed to be extremely flexible to approach a variety of problems. Two or three-dimensional space can readily be represented, and agents can move through this space.
Agents can communicate with each other through messages, and make requests.
Action will be coordinated through time steps in our implementation, but could also be eventdriven. Our approach is meant to be evolutionary in the sense that we will start with certain fundamental properties and processes, including a simplified representation of the environment and agricultural production, and proceed to develop various social behaviors in a layered fashion. For example, given our interest in the effects of sharing on village location and formation, it is logical to begin with a model in which the agents do not share any of their agricultural production. The space to be represented will correspond to the 36,759 4-ha cells in southwestern Colorado for which Van West has retrodicted potential maize productivity. The simulation will encompass the 400year period from A.D. 901-1300 for which these estimates are available.