Austen is meant to be a prototyping ground for a relation engine for gaming/simulation.
The objectives is to build a basic model for interactions and relations between people that can simulate behavior for the purpose of games that center around or involve relationships between the player and non-player characters. The goals of this project are to produce the most basic conceivable such engine that can have interesting effects and to get as quickly as possible to a place where we can determine if this would even be fun.
In general, the circumstances that we want to model are game theoretic - at each timestep each actor will make the decision that they deem best for their goal based on their (imperfect) knowledge of the world and desired outcome. To this end the engine is named of the famous game theorist and Aristotelean philosopher, Jane Austen.