Which traders starve, and how unequal do the survivors become? Traders crowd onto the two peaks. Harvested patches go dark and refill one unit per tick at the default growback-rate of 1.
Try this Set growback-rate to 0. It is read every tick, so it takes effect immediately. total-sugar drains to 0 within about 50 ticks, then trader-count falls as traders live off their stores, and the run stops when the last one starves.
About this model Where it ends up
Sugarscape is Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell's artificial society from Growing Artificial Societies (1996). This is a reduced version with one resource and no births. Traders that are short-sighted or burn sugar fast die early, and the survivors keep getting richer.
Setup builds two sugar peaks at (-16, 16) and (16, -16). Capacity is peak-sugar at each peak and drops by 1 every sugar-slope patches out. Traders get a random metabolism (1 to max-metabolism), vision (1 to max-vision) and starting store (initial-energy to just under twice that). Each tick, in random order, a trader looks at every patch within radius vision, moves to the richest one no other trader occupies (ties broken at random), eats all its sugar, pays its metabolism, and dies at 0. Then each patch regrows growback-rate sugar, up to its capacity. Only growback-rate is read during the run; the other sliders apply at Reset.
Compared with Epstein and Axtell's movement rule, vision here is a disc rather than the four lattice directions, and ties go to a random patch rather than the nearest. The landscape is generated rather than their fixed map, and there is no reproduction, aging, replacement or spice. Despite the breed name, nobody trades.
