Developer Journal 4

save file 100330-1049
step 882476 numFood 318 numAgent 2338
numSick 98 numChild239

I've been working on ways to reduce my population such as increasing the lower mating age limit, decreasing the upper mating age limit and increasing the waiting time between mating.

Normally I seek to have a large population to increase the chance that the population is stable. Luckily, some of my changes have resulted in more robust agents. I allowed agents to be able to store more energy and to be able to get more energy with each bite.

However, now the population is too big. I tried to decrease the amount of food but what happened was that agents had lots of children and lots of children would die because there was not a lot of food. So I've been working on increasing the available food but at the same time I've been reducing mating opportunities in way that I believe is more natural by adjusting the upper and lower mating age limits and the waiting period between mating.

I changed:

• mateWait from 2,048 steps to 5,096 steps.
• minMateAge from 5,000 steps to 10,000 steps
  
• maxMateAge from 90,000 steps to 80,000 steps
  

So each time an agent mates it must wait 5,096 steps before it is ready to mate again.

With these more robust agents, I'm thinking of working with much smaller population sizes, possibly about 256 agents to increasing the speed at which the simulation runes.