Environment design for emerging artificial societies

The NewTies project is developing a system in which societies of agents are expected to develop autonomously as a result of individual, population and social learning. These societies are expected to be able to solve the environmental challenges that they are set by acting collectively. The challenges are intended to be analogous to those faced by early, simple, small-scale human societies. Some issues in the construction of a virtual environment for the system are described and it is argued that multi-agent social simulation has so far tended to neglect the importance of environment design.