The Energy Token Store

A large number of cells may exist concurrently within Cosmos. In order to run the code of all of these cells, the processor must time slice between each cell, as described in Section 4.2.3. In that section a formula was given which shows how many instructions a cell with a genome of a given length is allowed to execute at each time slice. However, for the cell to actually execute this number of instructions, it must pay one energy token to the processor for each instruction it executes. A cell has a store of energy tokens (which it collects from the environment as described in Sections 4.5.2 and 4.5.3). Furthermore, a cell's Energy Token Store may be leaky, in which case a number of energy tokens are lost from the store at the end of each time slice, in addition to any that were used to pay for the execution of instructions. The leak rate of the store is determined by the parameter ets_leak_rate_per_timeslice, described in Section A.1.