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Game Mechanics

Object Definition

Settler

A settler is an agent that travels around the world, encounter items and learns words from its own experience. Settlers can exchange and influence each other's vocabulary according to given rules.

All settlers have an accent that is given by a particular genome. This genome has a common part for all the settlers at the beginning of the simulation, and a small random code.

Barbarian

The barbarian is an special type of settler that crosses the world once, normally followed by other barbarians (horde), simulating a foreigner invasion. Barbarians come with a common, random vocabulary and have more influence over other settlers' dictionaries. The horde normally comes in and out the map from different sides so that they can create influence regions.

Additionally, there is a chance that a Barbarian would stay instead of following their partners. Influenced by the amount of barbarians in its environments, as this number decreases, the chance of deciding to stay increases. This chance increases also in time, so the more time the barbarians spend in the map, the more likely it is they will decide to stay. Once one of them stays, it might trigger the settlement.

Finally, when a barbarian stays its influence decreases with time until it becomes a regular settler.

Foreigner

A foreigner is an educated visitor that comes normally alone and whether crosses the map like the barbarian, whether stays in it and moves around like the other agents. It comes with a random own dictionary and its influence is higher than that of a regular settler (but lower than the barbarian's).

Item

Object within the world that settlers identify and define by a word (name). Items are encoded by a genome of several bits and a similarity function may express the difference between them, which would lead to similar objects to have similar or the same words to define them.

Items, Barbarians and Foreigners

Barbarians and Foreigners can bring new items to the scene, each cycle there is a probability that they will drop a new item in the scene around them (the chance should be something like x10 higher for a foreigner than for a single barbarian).

There is also a chance that the barbarians will destroy an item around them (around x10 higher than the chance of bringing an object and almost equal to the chance that a foreigner would bring one with him).

Concepts

Agent names new objects they found depending on object's genome, agent's accent and a small random part. In that case, agent with the same accent would name new similar object with the same word.
Each agent has its own accent and could be influenced by the barbarian invasions.
When two agents meet each other, they exchange how they name objects in the area. Depending on their karma and their criticism they could influence the word an agent use to define an item.