Building Phaeacia: Generating Artificial Societies
Abstract
My project is to create a complex systems model of a world which will simulate societies based loosely around prehistoric humans. A complex systems approach to a problem is to model it on the level of individual components or agents. These agents can be anything from simple cells to very complex models of an organism. Under certain situations, interesting global patterns can emerge from such a system, without being explicitly programmed. My project, called Phaeacia for the land Odysseus visits in the Odyssey, contains human-like agents called Phaeacians. Each Phaeacian is endowed with simple behavior, which guides its actions in reaction to the environment concerning its individual needs to eat, sleep, procreate, die, and govern many other aspects of its life.