Terrarium Revisited – A Multi-Agent Ecosystem

In 2002, Microsoft developed a fun little developer game called Terrarium that demonstrated the code portability of the .NET Framework. Back then, C# and .NET were just newcomers and Microsoft had a tough sell; after all, it was dethroning VBA and Visual Basic as well as trying to steal away Java developers. The game allowed developers to build tiny programmable creatures that would be born, eat, sleep, reproduce, and die in a terrarium. It also featured the ability of allowing tiny programs to infect other connected terrariums. In fact, Microsoft has a contest that pitted these tiny creature programs against each other and the winning developer was the one that had the most successful creature. While we won't go so far as to build a connected terrarium infrastructure, we will do our best to replicate a number of the cooler...