University of Sussex School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (COGS) MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems (EASy) An Evaluation of the Scientific Potential of Evolutionary Artificial Life God-Games: Considering an Example Model for Experiments and Justification

The mounting popularity of agent-based simulation systems triggers a number of questions concerning their potential in terms of the scientific fields they are linked with, as well as their limitations in terms of possible uses in fields related to entertainment. The realization of their aesthetic prospective has motivated the creation of models which are more than simple simulations and offer control over lower-level variables that define the system, a growing number of which should be expected to emerge over the following years. This study considers an overview of the context and principles underlying the design of autonomous agents throughout their history of existence, and proposes an example model which features a scheme for action selection inspired solely from ethological issues. Such an approach pays more attention to the potential of such techniques in terms of understanding animal behaviour, and converges to the fact that researchers should turn their heads towards real environments for the design of such agents, even though emergent behaviour is achieved with the use of a very abstract architecture. The model is subsequently aimed to incorporate features that will make it as interesting as possible, to reach the conclusion that there is adequate potential in applying agent-based simulation techniques in entertainment applications, particularly when compared with current approaches to Game Artificial Intelligence.