Sugarscape Agent Model

Sugarscape (Epstein & Axtell, Growing Artificial Societies, 1996): agents have heterogeneous vision and metabolism. Each agent moves to the richest visible cell, harvests sugar, and pays metabolic cost. Die if sugar=0; new agents born to maintain population. Despite identical rules, wealth inequality emerges spontaneously — the Gini coefficient converges to ~0.5 regardless of initial conditions, matching real income distributions. No exploitation needed: inequality is a generic emergent property of resource competition.