Environmental Information

As well as carrying specific inter-organism communications (mentioned in Section 4.3.7 and explained in more detail in Sections 4.5.5 and 4.6.1), the environment also carries summary information about itself. These messages are transmitted (in the form of EnvironmentalInfoStrings) by the environment itself, one at each grid position, and may be intercepted by cells in exactly the same way as they intercept other inter-organism communications. The messages contain the following information (represented in a binary encoding):

• The number of cells at that grid position
• The total number of free energy tokens at that grid position

All of these messages behave just like any other EnvironmentalInfoStrings in the environment; the only distinguishing feature is that they are all given an InfoString type of 15. (There are no restrictions about organisms using the same type number for their own communications.) They may be picked up by any cell using the rms_receive instruction.