Over 100 projects have been created with the AgentSheets environment ranging from sinlge afternoon hacks by kids to several man-year efforts created by computer science professionals. We are working on making a larger number of projects available.
Many of the more recent projects have been created with the Visual AgenTalk tool. Most of them are fairly simple but as this new programming approach is evolving further with your help this is changing.
If you have created an interesting project please send it to us and we will include it in this project repository. Already we have some projects from the USA, Canada, Germany, and England. If you are more interested or would like to share individual Agents have a look at the Behavior Exchange.
The files here expand into folders that belong into the project folder.
by Alexander Repenning, Email: ralex@cs.colorado.edu
The Bridge Design Environment with "force" feedback. Build your own bridge and experience forces. Remove as many bricks as you can to reduce the cost of the bridge but .. in the case of instability your bridge will collapse under the load of cars driving over it. Computing the forces in all the bricks the bridge provides you with feedback (some call it critique) by colorizing bricks indicating structural tension.
Bridge-Builder.hqx, 5/17/97, 63 kb
SimCalc & AgentSheetsby Richard Delaura, SimCalc Chief Software Developer, Email: rdelaura@umassd.edu and Alexander Repenning, Email: ralex@cs.colorado.edu
Model of virus propagation. This is the first prototype project connecting
the SimCalc and the Agenthsheets environments via AppleScript. AgentSheets simulations
can be treated as functions feeding a value into the AgentSheets environment that
can be accessed by all agents, running one simulation cycle, and returning a value
that is computed by agents. An example AppleScript is included.
SimCalc-AgentSheets.hqx, 1/16/97, 70 kb
by Alexander Repenning, Email: ralex@cs.colorado.edu
Electrical simulator. Wire up some bulbs, electric solenoids and buzzers. The unique thing about this project is that it supports TWO types of flow: wires conduct electric flow and air conducts elecromagenetic flow. If you put an electromagnet close to a magnetic switch could can build all sort of things. The aproach taken to model flow is that messages representing either electric or electromagnetic flow propagate via conductors (wires or air respectively). If these messages reach active components/agents such as bulbs and buzzers they will trigger some behavior. This method cannot be used for complex topologies nor does it take grounding into account. This is one of the oldest AgentSheets projects going back to 1989: the agents in Electric World are NOT programmed with the Visual AgenTalk tool. If you create a Visual AgenTalk Tool -based version - this would not be too hard to do - please send us a copy.
Electric-World.hqx, 1/8/97, 49 kb
by Alexander Repenning, Email: ralex@cs.colorado.edu
Electrical
simulator with a twist. Like the Electric Ink and the Heat Diffusion
project this project models physcial phenomena using a diffusion process.
Use any number of power sources, wire them up with thin or thick wires. Find out
about the voltage and current at any point in the circuit. With this simulation large
amounts of current can get thin wires to heat up and even get them to glow. Unlike
the approach taken in the Electric World project, diffusion can deal with arbitrary
complex topologies. Any number of power sources can be used. More like cellular
automata in this diffusion process every agent representing pieces of wires,
bulbs, ameters, etc. localy computes all it's values. In order to localy compute
voltage, current, power, and even heat without refering to any kind of global information
space is folded into time. Wheehh... A more elaborate discussion inlcuding
equations
can be found in the Visual Language Benchmarks pages The flexibility of this
simulation approach comes at the price of computational complexity. Even on a fast
machine it will take a while for circuits to settle (but they will) to their final
value.. If you have a fast machine you may want to try the Electric Ink project below
with uses an even finer degree of granulary of computation.
Electric-Diffusion.hqx, 1/8/97, 55 kb
by Alexander Repenning, Email: ralex@cs.colorado.edu
Thermal simulator. Like the Electric Ink and the Electric Diffusion project this project models physcial phenomena using a diffusion process. Instead of electric resistors this simulation is based on thermal resistors. Draw a house with walls and windows. Put any number of heat sources and sinks (e.g., air conditioners) into the house and explore the distribution of the heat throughout the entire house. Change the temperature of sources and sinks and observe the consequence. Find out how much heat goes out of the window. The old house where my wife and I lived for quite some time comes with this simulation. The fact that electric circuits can be modeled excately the same way as head distribution in a house could be called a Powerful Idea. A more elaborate discussion regarding diffusion inlcuding equations can be found in the Visual Language Benchmarks pages.
Heat-Diffusion.hqx, 1/8/97, 61 kb
by Alexander Repenning, Email: ralex@cs.colorado.edu
Fine
Grained Electrical simulator. Like the Electric Diffusion and the Heat
Diffusion project this project models physcial phenomena using a diffusion process.
Every agent represent a fragment of a wire with some resistance. These agents are
so fine that we call them Electric Ink. The amazing thing about this approach to
electrical simluation is that you can draw visual representations of electric cirrcuits
without the system having any preconceived knowledge of what a resistor symbol is.
If you draw a resistor in Electric Ink as a squiggly line you automatically get a
resistor! An in-depth discussion including equations and an explanation why this
works with American symbols for electric components but not with German DIN symbols
can be found in the Visual Language Benchmarks pages. Electric Ink is similar to drawing
a diagram with a pencil onto a piece of paper. Since the grapite is an electric conductor
what you draw on a piece of paper could be used as the real thing (What you draw
is what you get). Only to a very limited degree of course. Electric Ink allows you
to go further. For instance you could scan in some - simple - electric diagram,
hook up some power sources to it and see what happens.
Diagrams drawn in electric ink can be executed rendering attributes to color values. Electric ink can either show voltage (Figure left) or current (Figure right) of - litteraly - every point in a circuit diagram.
See the discussion about about Electric Diffusion to see how this works. Since the granularity of this version is so fine you need a lot of computational power. Get your old connection machine. Fine grained diffusion makes you appreciate how fast nature works by use of super massive parallelism.
Electric-Ink.hqx, 1/8/97, 41 kb
by Alexander Repenning, Email: ralex@cs.colorado.edu
Robol is a naive visual programming language used to illustrate how to use links and how to use agents that act like spread sheet cells. The best way to experience the issues of visual programming languages is to create a visual programming language. Robol serves as a foundation that can be extended. The agents in Robol are not programmed with the Visual AgenTalk tool.
Robol.hqx, 11/7/96, 39 kb
by Thilo Hübner, Email: f05i@zfn.uni-bremen.de
The
arcade classics objective is to eat all the pills and evade contact with the monsters.
Three different kinds of monsters are included and you are invited to create new,
even meaner versions. Some of the methods have german names so you might need a german-english dictionary.
The program is so fast that I bet you won't finish the first level with less then
5 lives.
Der-Packmann.hqx, 10/25/96, 85 kb
by Alexander Repenning, Email: ralex@cs.colorado.edu
A
bitmap editor. Illustrates how to use tools as triggers. The pen tool is used to
toggle the color of pixels and the hammer tool is used to fill regions of adjacent
pixels. The fill algorith uses a simple recursion.
Bitmap-Editor.hqx, 5/28/96, 43 kb
by Alexander Repenning, Email: ralex@cs.colorado.edu
A simple seed to a high paced space game. Using a single keyboard up
to 3 players can control 3 types of space ships independently. Ships can be navigated
and can fire on each other. Illustrates an approach to decouple navigation, animation
and other actions.
Space-Ships.hqx, July 29, 1996, 128 kb
By Jim Sullivan, Email fj2236@se.usma.edu, US Army Department of Systems Engineering, United States Military Academy, West Point
This
is a simulation classic proposed by T. C, Schelling introducing the notion of Micromotives
to explain behaviors. Micromotives are local decisions such as into what kind of
neighborhood to move. People seem to have only limited understanding on how these
local decisions can influence more global issues. Often, seemingly fair local decisions
lead to global disaster.
Create your own neighborhood, explore micromotives and policies. Segregation.hqx,
July 24, 1996, 43 kb
by Alexander Repenning, Email: ralex@cs.colorado.edu
A
project suggested by Mitchel Resnik to explore the notion of Distributed Constructionism.
The roots of this idea is going back to Allan Kay's Play Ground system resulting
from the Vivarium project. The fish tank contains - well - fish, and many other things
including a little surprise. Would be fun to have a growing collection of things
for this tank. Sharks by Corrina
Perrone.
Fisch-Tank.hqx, July 16, 1996, 43 kb
by Martin Rausch, Email: mrausch@cs.colorado.edu
John McCarthy
suggest the use of the Lemming game as testground or drosophilia for AI research
"connecting logical formalizations with information that is incompletely formalizable
in practice."This is a Visual AgenTalk tool version of the Lemming game. You can not only play the game but also change and share it. With the
AgentShare extension you can share your new Lemming agents with other players.
Lemming-Meister.hqx July, 12, 1996, 51 kb