The problem

The field of agent based social simulation is relatively new and lacks the abundance of tools and packages available in other fields. This is exactly the problem this project will attempt to address by creating a flexible artificial life simulation environment, capable of distributing the processing requirements onto several computers.

The toolkit is to be designed to accommodate a specific class of simulations, namely the ones in which the agents are computationally intensive (neural networks, or complex processing rules). There are some such toolkits already in existence; the most prominent and well developed one is SWARM. However, none of them are capable of running the simulation in a distributed manner and most of them are bound to one or two specific programming languages (Objective C and Java for SWARM). If an experimenter needed to use any other language than the one used initially for developing the toolkit a complete port would be required.