Evaluating the Impact of Increasing Memory on Agent Behaviour: Adaptive Patterns in an Agent Based Simulation of Subsistence

This is an interim report on a set of ongoing agent-based simulation experiments. The main goal of the experiments is to evaluate the impact of varying memory capacities on the ability of agents to adapt to given subsistence environments and resource landscapes. The results so far suggest that increasing the number of events which an agent can use in decision making does not directly lead to an increase in the agent’s ability to adapt to an environment. Variable memory capacity, however, does lead to diversification of agent behaviour patterns in a given environment. The results also suggest that more permissive environments allow agents with greater memory to show a greater diversity of behaviour than similar agents in more restrictive environments. These early results are providing the starting hypotheses which are at the core of a larger set of experiments presently being carried out. The simulation engine and source code are available from the author.