Agentscript: Agent Based Modeling in the Browser

I took a a couple classes in college that were taught in NetLogo. While it isn't the most practical language (except for visual simulations), I think it's incredibly valuable to learn to think in terms of isolated agents. It brings together OOP and functional programming and is a good foundation to learn multi-threading or light-weight processes like in Erlang/Elixir.

Woah this is awesome and I love the ant foraging simulation example!

A few months ago someone posted about an in-browser sand/water/fish simulation and there was a discussion thread about similar ant simulations! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36002901

Neat. My master's project many years back was something like this but built in XNA (which was the style at the time). I mostly just had simple triangular "turtles" ("bees" in this system, because of a bee swarm metaphor naming convention, for silly reasons such as naming things is hard) by the time I presented the project (and graduated), but I had some fun with them, all three vertices could have different colors and there were some things we were doing with that.

The big thing I was exploring, however, was a more prototypical-inheritance-oriented development. Rather than forEach() style callbacks, instance methods were used (`Update(time)`) and could be inherited from prototypes (which was the default as the Clone method was the default way to create new "bees"/"turtles"). The prototype-inheritance worked in sort of "copy on write" way that properties would be entirely shared across the prototype chain until changed for a specific instance.

I used the Boo language in the C#-based REPL environment. That was a Python-inspired .NET language (which has somewhat disappeared since). At the time, I built the prototype-style inheritance as a combination of hacks of C# object graphs of hash tables (`Dictionary<K, V>` with an added "ownership" concept) and Boo macros (and not quite finished at the pencil's down time: `IQuackFoo` [Boo] and `IDynamicObject` [DLR] support).

(I think I'd have to dig the old darcs repo out of mothballed backups at this point, but I did find my final presentation on it in my Documents folder, otherwise I wouldn't have remembered half of this.)

Anyway, the interesting thing about Agentscript being in JS, itself a prototype-based language, is that you should be able to easily recreate much of what I did in that old project, except maybe the "copy on write" semantics might need a bit of fudging. I still think that prototype-based inheritance (and even things like runtime prototype switching) is still a very useful avenue of exploration for Agent based modeling like this (and underappreciated in general, especially now that JS' own prototype-oriented nature is increasingly obscured behind the class syntax sugar). It can be a little more interesting that imperative forEach-based modeling.

this is such a cool idea, I'm a beginner game developer and wanted to create a vibrant city that feels alive, this just gives me an idea to try ABM