BONABEAU APPS

Agent-based pattern formation

Interactive versions of the models in Eric Bonabeau, "From Classical Models of Morphogenesis to Agent-Based Models of Pattern Formation," Artificial Life 3 (1997) 191–211. Pick a model, load one of the paper's figures as a preset, and change the parameters while it runs.

10/frame

Implementation notes
  • The grid is a torus, as in the paper. Neighborhoods are square: "within distance d" means the (2d+1)×(2d+1) block around a site, which matches the 3×3 and 9×9 windows of Figure 7.
  • Agents take one step per time unit to one of the four neighboring sites. All agent models update asynchronously, one agent after another in random order.
  • Memory records the state of the site an agent lands on, before the agent acts there. τ = 1 is the most recent entry.
  • In the memory-based models (sections 5 and 6) the number of items is fixed: an agent must pick an item up before it can drop one. In the "space remains space" model (section 4) bricks are created and destroyed freely, as in Young's cellular automaton.
  • The paper does not state how many agents were used in sections 4 to 6, so the agent count is a free parameter here.
  • "Clean" applies the one-pass filter of Figure 16 to the current grid.
  • All sums are plain cell or memory counts, as written in the equations. For the memory models the paper's parameter values work as printed; for Young's automaton and its direct agent version they are divided by four (see the note under those models).