Simulating Adaptation to Environmental Change: Complexity and Organized Behaviour Within Environmental Bounds (COBWEB)

The architecture, Complexity and Organized Behaviour Within Environmental Bounds (COBWEB), was developed to support an anticipatory approach to adaptation. COBWEB consists of a large number of autonomous agents, each a genetic algorithm, using different strategies to adapt to changing resource availability. Anticipatory genetic algorithms, that are Turing complete, as well as mutation are used to allow the agents to respond to a changing environment. The simulation has four attractors, which exhibit sensitivity to initial conditions, and the spatial patterns of the agents exhibit wide variation as well as local structure, which might indicate adapive or anticipatory behaviour