Agents


As the name suggests, agents lie at the heart of agent-based modeling. Agents are made up of State, Behaviors, and Context.

Anatomy of an Agent

Every agent has a name and a unique identifier. As a simulation creator, you can set and change the agent_name and you can set the agent_idbefore the agent is initialized, but you can't change the agent_id after the simulation has started.

The HASH Engine by default will set the agent_id, so don't worry about setting it manually unless you have a particular need for an agent's id value in the sim logic.

JavaScript
Python
const agent = {
    agent_id: <uuid v4>, // Set on_create by the hEngine
    agent_name: <string>
}

Naming your agent is entirely optional. The simplest possible agent is simply {} (although it won't do much of anything!)

An individual agent has a state and a context.

An Agent

When we define the initial conditions of a simulation, we're defining the initial agents that will be present in the first timestep of the simulation, each of which will have its own state and context.

Three agents, ready to simulate.