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"Any path that narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap" -The Spacing Guild Handbook

MABE (Modular Agent-Based Evolution platform)

A tool for evolving and analyzing digital brains.

Click here for installation and quick start instructions

Click here for a detailed breakdown of MABEs parts

MABE creates and manages populations of evolving digital organisms which are evaluated in worlds. Using the results of the evaluations new populations are generated by means of natural, artificial, and/or sexual selection.

The purpose of MABE is twofold:

1. To support academic research into topics related to evolution:
   • genetic dynamics
   • haploid vs. diploid
   • behavior
   • intelligence
   • sex and sexual selection
2. To provide insight into evolution and evolutionary processes

To support the first aim, MABE has been designed to allow users to change the way that MABE works in order to support their particular experiments and simplify expanding experiments. MABE is broken into parts which can be recombined (i.e. pick any genome, brain and a world and MABE will work). This modularity, combined with access to various parameters, is sufficient for many experiments. For those experiments that require additional functionality, MABE includes instruction guides and examples to help users add parameters or design their own new parts.

To support the second aim, MABE encourages users to document parameters as they add them. As a result, MABE auto generates configuration files with usage messages. This allows a user to start experimenting with MABE without needing to do significant setup.

MABE avoids complex programming methods. Where we have employed more advanced methods it has been either to make the code easier to work with or significantly faster. In addition, these more advanced methods are used only in low-level features which most users are unlikely to directly encounter.

MABE has been designed to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. MABE is written in c++11 using only standard libraries.

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Before getting into Details it is useful to get a broad idea of the parts of MABE.

Let us consider an experiment involving lab rats being tested in a maze.

The rat (an Organism) contains a brain which determines how the rat interacts with the maze, and a genome, which provides a blueprint for the brain. The digital test subjects in MABE are called Organisms and the rat brain and genome are synonymous with the brain and genome in MABE.

A collection of rats makes up a population. In MABE, a collection of Organisms is also called a population.

The maze in this experiment is synonymous with the world in MABE.

MABE's archivist is synonymous with a person who collates all the data collected by the various scientists on the experiment and decides what data needs to be stored.

MABE's optimizer is synonymous with a person who decides which rats will be mated to produce the next generation.

A group in MABE is made up of a population of organisms, an optimizer and an archivist.

MABE development is lead by Clifford Bohm. Click here to visit his page.