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# Can I make a Vehicles Agents Game in lispgamejam?
Using *my* [software-individuals KRF](https://codeberg.org/tfw/pawn-75) to make a complex multi-agent world (which is a game in some sense, maybe WORK IN PROGRESS).

[Ksaj](https://ksaj.sdf.org/) set me [Vehicles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle) to read a while ago. Braitenberg strongly indicated a theory of human-like minds by sticking simple arrangements of sensors and motors to the wheels of toy cars.

My one (nˊee the unsung seminal decade of [Erik Sandewall](https://liu.se/en/news-item/erik-sandewall-har-avlidit)) throws away the toy cars as not quite grand enough, instead making 'software-individual' clusters (of toy car style agents) sharing a single thread (so the agents organise non-concurrently), and then having those software-individuals communicate / organise concurrently using communication protocols.

A Braitenbergian agent is like a car that can detect things it likes either left or right of it, and when it sees one, it turns towards it, and slows down when it becomes close. Braitenberg leans on the intuition that this toy car that wants to spend time with things it likes is very simple in terms of sensors and motors. The implication is that humans liking things could straightforwardly be just a lot of simple behaviours like the liking-things car agent.

My software-individuals reduce to Braitenberg's vehicles if each software-individual had only a single agent. Though Braitenberg's software individuals themselves are already relatively composite (turns towards things it likes, /and/ slows down and stops?).

## Game world though

- Spatial grid
- - This is surprisingly challenging to do viewing the grid itself as an agent
- Vehicles: I'm thinking
- - Plants
- - - They just spread out away from each other, and don't need to eat anything
- - Insects:
- - - They like and eat plants (think grasshoppers)
- - Birds: They
- - - Like to sleep in trees when they're sleepy
- - - Like to eat insects when they're hungry

You can see the escalating complexity, which I have frontloaded by declaring that the game board itself is alive in the software-individuals sense.

My stretch goal, given I have basically just tomorrow to work on this is that I would love to see Lyapunov dynamics between plants/insects/birds. Which means that lacking too many insects, plants spread. Lots of plants causes the insect population to boom: Plants become scarce as too many insects eat them, The insects die off (or are eaten by birds), less insects mean the plant population booms again.

### That doesn't sound like a game
Does too! What if we add one omnivore (you). Well, you could 'hunter gather' by passively following where food is available. But a more sophisticated strategy might be agrarian - to raise crops in one place, and try and protect them from locusts. Could it be possible to sustain a delicious insect population with a combination of plants and birds?

# Discuss!
[Mastodon toot](https://mastodon.sdf.org/@screwtape/114483135834607296)

See you at the show on every Wednesday 0UTC (see mastodon)

Mutuals plz

[Lispgamejam thread](https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2025/topic/4858711/what-genre-is-simulation-eat-things-or-you-die)