Question

Artificial stupidity

Having the inhabitants of our world go extinct after a few minutes is kind of depressing. To deal with this, we could try to create a smarter plant eater.

There are several obvious problems with our herbivores. First, they are terribly greedy, stuffing themselves with every plant they see until they have wiped out the local plant life. Second, their randomized movement (recall that the view.find method returns a random direction when multiple directions match) causes them to stumble around ineffectively and starve if there don’t happen to be any plants nearby. And finally, they breed very fast, which makes the cycles between abundance and famine quite intense.

Write a new critter type that tries to address one or more of these points and substitute it for the old PlantEater type in the valley world. See how it fares. Tweak it some more if necessary.

Predators

Any serious ecosystem has a food chain longer than a single link. Write another critter that survives by eating the herbivore critter. You’ll notice that stability is even harder to achieve now that there are cycles at multiple levels. Try to find a strategy to make the ecosystem run smoothly for at least a little while.

One thing that will help is to make the world bigger. This way, local population booms or busts are less likely to wipe out a species entirely, and there is space for the relatively large prey population needed to sustain a small predator population.

This is a book about getting computers to do what you want them to do. Computers are about as common as screwdrivers today, but they contain a lot more hidden complexity and thus are harder to operate and understand. To many, they remain alien, slightly threatening things.