Botworld is a cellular automaton developed at MIRI as a concrete environment in which to study self-modifying agents embedded in their environment. (Contrast this with "classical" models of artificial intelligence where agents interact with the environment only via I/O channels.)

An extensive introduction to Botworld can be found in the Botworld technical report. The source code for Botworld can be found in the corresponding literate Haskell file.

Some examples may be found in the examples directory.

Setup

If you don't have Haskell (namely, cabal), the Haskell platform is a good way to get it.

Once you have cabal installed, simply run cabal install in this directory to install Botworld. You may then import the Botworld module in any Haskell file.

To play around with Botworld, you can start by playing around with the rudimentary example. Make sure you have ghci installed, then load up the file with

ghci examples/Rudimentary.hs

Then simply run

main

to see a visualization of the example game.