Zamin, an agent based artificial life model

Zamin artificial life model is designed to be a general purpose environment for researches on evolution of learning methods, living strategies and complex behaviors and is used in several studies thus far. As a main target for Zamin's design has been its expandability and ease of problem definition, a new agent based structure for this artificial world is introduced in this paper, which is believed to be much easier to use and extend. In this new model, all control and world running processes are done by agents. Therefore, any change in world processes does not require recoding the main engine and can be done just by altering the behavior of one or some agents. To have an easier interface for the design of new organisms, all creatures' communications with the world level is done through a common message map, thus, a designer just needs to code the required parts and append them to the main system to process the necessary messages. And at last, extending the model can be done with much less effort, as it can be done easily by creating new agents that handle the new tasks. This model is implemented and some coding differences with previous model are presented.