The environment is based on the simulation environment as presented in Steven Mascaro's 1999 Honours Thesis [21]. The previous use for the simulation was to investigate the evolution of ethics through utilitarianism (see [22,23,24]). The original environment consisted of the board, food and agents. There was only one type of food and one type of agent, with the agents' actions restricted to walking, turning, eating, mating and suicide. They could observe global population density, global food density, their age and their health. The genetic structure of these agents were simple lists of probabilistic production rules.
The environment was further developed in the summer of 1999/2000. The agents' genetic structure was redesigned to be a probabilistic finite state automaton system, with appropriate genetic operators. This will be discussed in greater detail in section 3.8.
The rest of this section describes the simulation as it is currently implemented.