Academic index

Ecological Artificial Life

(3 September 2004)

As part of my MSc in Advanced Computing, I did a project on Ecological Artificial Life (results pending).

Report

Declaration

I hereby declare that the work presented in this dissertation is entirely my own work and any external material is clearly referenced.

Abstract

This report discusses the design and implementation of an artificial life simulation. This models a bee hive, with the birth and death of individual bees, and a foraging workforce.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my supervisor, Richard Overill.

Also thanks to Jay Hosler, for writing "Clan Apis" [2], which first inspired me to study bees in more detail.

Contents

• 1. Introduction and background

• 2. Literature review and background for the project

• 3. Design and Specification

  • 3.1 Modelling

  • 3.2 Framework

    • 3.2.1 Terrarium

    • 3.2.2 Swarm

    • 3.2.3 AgentBuilder

    • 3.2.4 Ascape

    • 3.2.5 Half-Life

    • 3.2.6 Mathematical models

    • 3.2.7 Other simulations

  • 3.3 Parallel processing

• 4. Implementation

  • 4.1 Choice of language

  • 4.2 Video

  • 4.3 Collision detection

  • 4.4 Usage instructions

    • 4.4.1 The toolbar

    • 4.4.2 The viewing area

    • 4.4.3 Other pictures

    • 4.4.4 Statistics

  • 4.5 Game loop

    • 4.5.1 Queen

    • 4.5.2 Worker

    • 4.5.3 Drone

  • 4.6 Search algorithm

• 5. Testing

• 6. Conclusion and Future Work

• Bibliography

• Appendix - source code

Download

If you would like to run the application, you can download the compiled executable. You will need to have the Microsoft .NET framework v1.1 installed on your computer, which you can get from the Windows Update website (a 23 Mb download). I recommend installing service pack 1 for the framework, but that is optional. Alternately, you may be able to use Mono on other platforms, but I haven't tested this. (If you do try it, I'd be interested to find out whether it works or not.) Please see section 4.4 of the report for usage instructions.

This page was last updated on 2004-09-05 by John C. Kirk