Sugarscape
Agents with heterogeneous vision and metabolism move toward the richest sugar patches they can see, harvesting sugar and dying when their stores run out. Wealth inequality emerges spontaneously, following a Pareto-like distribution.
About this lab
Sugarscape, introduced by Epstein and Axtell in their 1996 book "Growing Artificial Societies," is a landmark agent-based model showing how complex social phenomena emerge from simple individual rules. The landscape contains sugar deposits concentrated in two peaks. Agents vary in their vision (how far they can see) and metabolism (sugar consumption per tick).
Each tick, an agent looks in the four cardinal directions up to its vision range, moves to the richest visible unoccupied cell, collects all sugar there, and loses metabolism units from its internal store. An agent dies when its sugar store reaches zero, and is replaced by a new agent with random attributes born at a random location.
The remarkable result is that the wealth distribution becomes highly unequal, closely resembling a Pareto distribution, even though agents start with equal initial wealth and the rules are perfectly fair. Agents with greater vision and lower metabolism naturally accumulate more — exactly the kind of inequality seen in real economies emerging from simple talent differences.