Using Virtual Worlds to Facilitate the Exploration of Ancient Landscapes

The Land Bridge – Cultural Algorithms Program Simulation (L-CAPS) system is a functional interface for learning group behavior using Cultural Algorithms (CA). It enables the Cultural Algorithms process to implicitly communicate with, modify, and evaluate autonomous game agents restricted to an external virtual world. The L-CAPS system extends the work of Kinnaird-Heether (Reynolds & Kinnaird-Heether, 2010), and is able to examine the viability of using CA in learning group behavior in games, as well as the ability for CA to be extended to more general game designs. Here it is applied to the learning of large group movement for the Land Bridge reality game. The goal of the Land Bridge Game is to recreate the virtual world of an ancient land bridge that extended across modern Lake Huron between 10,000 B.C. and 7000 B.C. Here, the authors are trying to predict the location of hunting sites, assuming that the positioning of those sites is related to the distribution of available game. In this paper they use L-CAPS to tune an algorithm to simulate the movement of large herds of caribou. In subsequent work the authors will then generate optimal paths for these herds through the ancient landscape using various path planning algorithms.