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Lab 3: Predator-Prey Agents

In this lab we will look at two different ways of extending our agent simulation to take into account that animals can have two different sexes: female and male.

In the first part of the lab you will re-use the code from lab 2 and create a new type of sheep (⚥Sheep) which has an additional field sex. In the second part you will redesign the type hierarchy from scratch using parametric types to make this agent system much more flexible and julian.

Part I: Female & Male Sheep

The code from lab 2 that you will need in the first part of this lab can be found here.

The goal of the first part of the lab is to demonstrate the forwarding method (which is close to how things are done in OOP) by implementing a sheep that can have two different sexes and can only reproduce with another sheep of opposite sex.

This new type of sheep needs an additonal field sex::Symbol which can be either :male or :female. In OOP we would simply inherit from Sheep and create a ⚥Sheep with an additional field. In Julia there is no inheritance - only subtyping of abstract types. As you cannot inherit from a concrete type in Julia, we will have to create a wrapper type and forward all necessary methods. This is typically a sign of unfortunate type tree design and should be avoided, but if you want to extend a code base by an unforeseen type this forwarding of methods is a nice work-around. Our ⚥Sheep type will simply contain a classic sheep and a sex field

struct ⚥Sheep <: Animal
    sheep::Sheep
    sex::Symbol
end
⚥Sheep(id, e=4.0, Δe=0.2, pr=0.8, pf=0.6, sex=rand(Bool) ? :female : :male) = ⚥Sheep(Sheep(id,e,Δe,pr,pf),sex)
julia> sheep = ⚥Sheep(1)Main.⚥Sheep(🐑 #1 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6, :female)
julia> sheep.sheep🐑 #1 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6
julia> sheep.sex:female

Instead of littering the whole code with custom getters/setters Julia allows us to overload the sheep.field behaviour by implementing custom getproperty/setproperty! methods.

Exercise:

Implement custom getproperty/setproperty! methods which allow to access the Sheep inside the ⚥Sheep as if we would not be wrapping it.

Solution:

# NOTE: the @forward macro we will discuss in a later lecture is based on this

function Base.getproperty(s::⚥Sheep, name::Symbol)
    if name in fieldnames(Sheep)
        getfield(s.sheep,name)
    else
        getfield(s,name)
    end
end

function Base.setproperty!(s::⚥Sheep, name::Symbol, x)
    if name in fieldnames(Sheep)
        setfield!(s.sheep,name,x)
    else
        setfield!(s,name,x)
    end
end

You should be able to do the following with your overloads now

julia> sheep = ⚥Sheep(1)Main.⚥Sheep(🐑 #1 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6, :female)
julia> sheep.id1
julia> sheep.sex:female
julia> sheep.energy += 15.0
julia> sheepMain.⚥Sheep(🐑 #1 E=5.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6, :female)

In order to make the ⚥Sheep work with the rest of the code we only have to forward the eat! method

julia> eat!(s::⚥Sheep, food, world) = eat!(s.sheep, food, world);
julia> sheep = ⚥Sheep(1);
julia> grass = Grass(2);
julia> world = World([sheep,grass])Main.World{Main.Agent}
  🌿 #2 70% grown
  Main.⚥Sheep(🐑 #1 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6, :male)
julia> eat!(sheep, grass, world)0

and implement a custom reproduce! method with the behaviour that we want.

However, the extension of Sheep to ⚥Sheep is a very object-oriented approach. With a little bit of rethinking, we can build a much more elegant solution that makes use of Julia's powerful parametric types.

Part II: A new, parametric type hierarchy

First, let us note that there are two fundamentally different types of agents in our world: animals and plants. All species such as grass, sheep, wolves, etc. can be categorized as one of those two. We can use Julia's powerful, parametric type system to define one large abstract type for all agents Agent{S}. The Agent will either be an Animal or a Plant with a type parameter S which will represent the specific animal/plant species we are dealing with.

This new type hiearchy can then look like this:

abstract type Species end

abstract type PlantSpecies <: Species end
abstract type Grass <: PlantSpecies end

abstract type AnimalSpecies <: Species end
abstract type Sheep <: AnimalSpecies end
abstract type Wolf <: AnimalSpecies end

abstract type Agent{S<:Species} end

# instead of Symbols we can use an Enum for the sex field
# using an Enum here makes things easier to extend in case you
# need more than just binary sexes and is also more explicit than
# just a boolean
@enum Sex female male

Now we can create a concrete type Animal with the two parametric types and the fields that we already know from lab 2.

mutable struct Animal{A<:AnimalSpecies} <: Agent{A}
    const id::Int
    energy::Float64
    const Δenergy::Float64
    const reprprob::Float64
    const foodprob::Float64
    const sex::Sex
end

To create an instance of Animal we have to specify the parametric type while constructing it

julia> Animal{Wolf}(1,5,5,1,1,female)Main.Animal{Main.Wolf}(1, 5.0, 5.0, 1.0, 1.0, Main.female)

Note that we now automatically have animals of any species without additional work. Starting with the overload of the show method we can already see that we can abstract away a lot of repetitive work into the type system. We can implement one single show method for all animal species!

Exercise:

Implement Base.show(io::IO, a::Animal) with a single method for all Animals. You can get the pretty (unicode) printing of the Species types with another overload like this: Base.show(io::IO, ::Type{Sheep}) = print(io,"🐑")

Solution:

function Base.show(io::IO, a::Animal{A}) where {A<:AnimalSpecies}
    e = a.energy
    d = a.Δenergy
    pr = a.reprprob
    pf = a.foodprob
    s = a.sex == female ? "♀" : "♂"
    print(io, "$A$s #$(a.id) E=$e ΔE=$d pr=$pr pf=$pf")
end

# note that for new species/sexes we will only have to overload `show` on the
# abstract species types like below!
Base.show(io::IO, ::Type{Sheep}) = print(io,"🐑")
Base.show(io::IO, ::Type{Wolf}) = print(io,"🐺")

Unfortunately we have lost the convenience of creating plants and animals by simply calling their species constructor. For example, Sheep is just an abstract type that we cannot instantiate. However, we can manually define a new constructor that will give us this convenience back. This is done in exactly the same way as defining a constructor for a concrete type:

Sheep(id,E,ΔE,pr,pf,s=rand(Sex)) = Animal{Sheep}(id,E,ΔE,pr,pf,s)

Ok, so we have a constructor for Sheep now. But what about all the other billions of species that you want to define in your huge master thesis project of ecosystem simulations? Do you have to write them all by hand? Do not despair! Julia has you covered.

Exercise:

Overload all AnimalSpecies types with a constructor. You already know how to write constructors for specific types such as Sheep. Can you manage to sneak in a type variable? Maybe with Type?

Solution:

function (A::Type{<:AnimalSpecies})(id::Int,E::T,ΔE::T,pr::T,pf::T,s::Sex) where T
    Animal{A}(id,E,ΔE,pr,pf,s)
end

# get the per species defaults back
randsex() = rand(instances(Sex))
Sheep(id; E=4.0, ΔE=0.2, pr=0.8, pf=0.6, s=randsex()) = Sheep(id, E, ΔE, pr, pf, s)
Wolf(id; E=10.0, ΔE=8.0, pr=0.1, pf=0.2, s=randsex()) = Wolf(id, E, ΔE, pr, pf, s)

We have our convenient, high-level behaviour back!

julia> Sheep(1)🐑♂ #1 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6
julia> Wolf(2)🐺♀ #2 E=10.0 ΔE=8.0 pr=0.1 pf=0.2
Exercise:

Check the methods for eat! and kill_agent! which involve Animals and update their type signatures such that they work for the new type hiearchy.

Solution:

function eat!(wolf::Animal{Wolf}, sheep::Animal{Sheep}, w::World)
    wolf.energy += sheep.energy * wolf.Δenergy
    kill_agent!(sheep,w)
end

# no change
# eat!(::Animal, ::Nothing, ::World) = nothing

# no change
# kill_agent!(a::Agent, w::World) = delete!(w.agents, a.id)

eats(::Animal{Wolf},::Animal{Sheep}) = true
eats(::Agent,::Agent) = false
# this one needs to wait until we have `Plant`s
# eats(::Animal{Sheep},g::Plant{Grass}) = g.size > 0

Exercise:

Finally, we can implement the new behaviour for reproduce! which we wanted. Build a function which first finds an animal species of opposite sex and then lets the two reproduce (same behaviour as before).

Solution:

mates(a::Animal{A}, b::Animal{A}) where A<:AnimalSpecies = a.sex != b.sex
mates(::Agent, ::Agent) = false

function find_mate(a::Animal, w::World)
    ms = filter(x->mates(x,a), w.agents |> values |> collect)
    isempty(ms) ? nothing : rand(ms)
end

function reproduce!(a::Animal{A}, w::World) where {A}
    m = find_mate(a,w)
    if !isnothing(m)
        a.energy = a.energy / 2
        vals = [getproperty(a,n) for n in fieldnames(Animal) if n ∉ [:id, :sex]]
        new_id = w.max_id + 1
        ŝ = Animal{A}(new_id, vals..., randsex())
        w.agents[ŝ.id] = ŝ
        w.max_id = new_id
    end
end

julia> s1 = Sheep(1, s=female)🐑♀ #1 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6
julia> s2 = Sheep(2, s=male)🐑♂ #2 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6
julia> w  = World([s1, s2])Main.World{Main.Animal{🐑}}
  🐑♂ #2 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6
  🐑♀ #1 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6
julia> reproduce!(s1, w); wMain.World{Main.Animal{🐑}}
  🐑♂ #2 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6
  🐑♂ #3 E=2.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6
  🐑♀ #1 E=2.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6
Exercise:

Implement the type hiearchy we designed for Plants as well.

Solution:

mutable struct Plant{P<:PlantSpecies} <: Agent{P}
    id::Int
    size::Int
    max_size::Int
end

# constructor for all Plant{<:PlantSpecies} callable as PlantSpecies(...)
(A::Type{<:PlantSpecies})(id, s, m) = Plant{A}(id,s,m)
(A::Type{<:PlantSpecies})(id, m) = (A::Type{<:PlantSpecies})(id,rand(1:m),m)

# default specific for Grass
Grass(id; max_size=10) = Grass(id, rand(1:max_size), max_size)

function Base.show(io::IO, p::Plant{P}) where P
    x = p.size/p.max_size * 100
    print(io,"$P  #$(p.id) $(round(Int,x))% grown")
end

Base.show(io::IO, ::Type{Grass}) = print(io,"🌿")

function eat!(sheep::Animal{Sheep}, grass::Plant{Grass}, w::World)
    sheep.energy += grass.size * sheep.Δenergy
    grass.size = 0
end
eats(::Animal{Sheep},g::Plant{Grass}) = g.size > 0

julia> g = Grass(2)🌿  #2 90% grown
julia> s = Sheep(3)🐑♂ #3 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6
julia> w = World([g,s])Main.World{Main.Agent}
  🌿  #2 90% grown
  🐑♂ #3 E=4.0 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6
julia> eat!(s,g,w); wMain.World{Main.Agent}
  🌿  #2 0% grown
  🐑♂ #3 E=5.8 ΔE=0.2 pr=0.8 pf=0.6