Teaching Turtles to Talk
Challenge
They say that misery loves company and that there is safety in numbers. The turtles in this Challenge have their own clichés—“turtles love company” and “there is happiness in numbers.” The turtles adopted these expressions because their happiness increases when they share a patch with another turtle.
To begin this Challenge you can explore the projects Shiny Happy Turtles 1 and Shiny Happy Turtles 2, which demonstrate two different ways that turtles can gain happiness when they share a patch with other turtles. See if you can figure out how the turtles increase their happiness in these projects. What methods are used in each project to affect the turtle behavior? What patterns of behavior can you identify in each project?
Next, look at the heart of these two projects (the procedures friends-meetset-avghappy) and create your own project that enables turtles to affect the happiness of other turtles. You can try experimenting with methods for increasing and decreasing happiness or exploring the effects of increased or decreased happiness. Your challenge is to create a project, incorporating principles from the sample projects, that enables turtles to influence each other’s happiness and react to their own levels of happiness.
Possible Explorations
· Think of a situation in which turtles might be unhappy if there were other turtles nearby. Try to implement this in your project.
· Look at what happens if happiness causes turtles to slow down or move in a different pattern. What happens if happy turtles alter their environment?
· Can you think of any animals that are happy when they stick close together? Are there any costs or benefits from that behavior? How would you model this kind of system?
· Some organisms behave differently when they are crowded. Can you think of an example of this kind of behavior? Can you create a model to illustrate your example?
For more information contact Vanessa Colella (vanessa@media.mit.edu) or Eric Klopfer (klopfer@mit.edu).