Has anybody got any reference material for History simulators? What I mean is create a virtual world (rivers, mountains etc) introduce 'humans', foodstuffs etc etc and rules for building civilizations, creating wars etc etc and leave it to run for 5000 years with each 'civilization' writing it's own history. The idea is to 'uncover' the history of the planet using virtual archaeology and documents. I've had a look at some A-Life sites but can't find anything similar.

I don't know of anything this complex but here is a workaround idea :

Take Freeciv and make 10 AIs fight together. Change the names of the wonders, register wars and achievments and you've got the beggining of something...

http://www.freeciv.org/index.php/Freeciv

This would require a massive agent-based model that has all the abilities of individual survival and awareness of/ability to take advantage of social connectivity. This is not small at all. The only things that have approached this are games like Black & White.

As far as your actual goal of simulating history... I'm not sure what you are getting at.

The idea is for humans to gather together, create settlements in appropriate places, build, fight, migrate, suffer diseases, famines, natural disasters etc. The history portion is they leave a record (like a log file) of their civilisation.
This log has significant achievments and events logged against a timeline.
A twist would be that these logs can be lost, corrupted, copied incorrectly and then lost etc etc.
At the moment it's just an interest to see if there's any work already out there.
In the loooooong run I would like to look into an Indiana Jones type adventure (i.e. read logs, do some archaeology, locate artifact and, errr, earn points... or something).

Or you can simply have an array of events that can happen to a single civilisation or to two civilisations relations and genrate logs.

100 AD:
"Civ A evolves from city-state to kingdom"
"Civ B suffers from famine and lost half its population"
"Civ C declares war to Civ A"

110 AD:
"Civ B engage in an alliance with Civ A"
"Civ C loses war and half its territory. It becomes a city-state"

120 AD:
"Civ A annexes Civ B"
"Civ A evolves from kingdom to empire"

etc...

Oddly enough, I'm doing some AI work on a project that does a bit of what you want yours to do. And sadly, there is nothing really out there that I found that does any sort of civilization engineering that incorporates aspects of agent individuality.

Just to let you know, this kind of AI is pretty darn tricky. We've gone through several redesigns already. Many of us have our doubts about the success of such a system. Like InnocuousFox said, this is no easy task.

I am not sure what sort of resources you have to through at the problem, but I would try and simplify the aspect of the individual.

I agree individual agents would be tricky. I'm thinking more about a simple sim with numbers of male/female, birthrate, deathrate etc. Trade routes, wars, etc are established when certain factors are reached (i.e. fertile area per person).
Monuments\temples are built to honour gods and generals/kings and are logged. However, these monuments might be destroyed with their location unknown and the only reference to them in the logs. In fact particular logs might not survive or only survive in legend or as extracts used in other logs.
It might be a bit out of my depth but I imagine leaving the sim running for 5000 years and then checking the map and logs.
Maybe 10 settlements joined to make civilisation 'A' which was destroyed by war, disease, famine, earthquake etc (think Inca, Mayan etc) and survivors moved to another area.
The only reference to Civ 'A' is the logs and any surviving buildings. Location of monuments etc is a mystery but the logs might provide clues to where they might be.
i.e. Surviving extract from trader's journal from Civ 'B'who visited Civ 'A's monument after spending a night at town 'b' on his way to town 'c'. This is a random trader who could have a randomly generated name (i.e. I don't expect this trader to exist) but there must have been a trade route from Civ 'B' to 'A' at the time the journal is written.
Bit of a pipedream at the moment and, as it doesn't seem too tricky, I'm worried that I might have missed something important especially from the initial reaction.
P.S. AP : Yep, the logs would be similar to those except...
110 AD:
"Civ B engage in an alliance with Civ A"
"Civ C loses war and half its territory. It becomes a city-state"
"Civ A and Civ B unite to build the temple of xxxx at yyyy which houses the golden helmet taken from the fallen king of Civ C.
The game section might involve finding the golden helmet (or at least the archaeology of the temple)
.
happylrac, resources are me, very limited AI knowledge and limited computer time (kids eh!!!)

[Edited by - tonyg on September 30, 2004 3:36:32 AM]

Quote: Original post by InnocuousFox
This would require a massive agent-based model that has all the abilities of individual survival and awareness of/ability to take advantage of social connectivity. This is not small at all. The only things that have approached this are games like Black & White.

You are giving Black & White way too much credit for actually doing anything. It provides a nice interface for configuring canned beast behaviors, that is all.

Sugarscape has been used to model historical events (such as the migration of native American Indians). It might be worth a look.

http://www.brook.edu/es/dynamics/sugarscape/default.htm

Sugarscape has been used to model historical events (such as the migration of native American Indians). It might be worth a look.

http://www.brook.edu/es/dynamics/sugarscape/default.htm