Purpose

For students to spend their time dealing with issues of agent coordination, cooperation, and emergent behaviors, but without completely sacrificing performance.
Biter does not provide tournament-level performance, but it would not be hard to extend it to do so.
To enable students to explore both reactive and goal-driven (BDI) architectures, and everything in between.
To provide students with a basic framework and avoid the dreaded if-then-else statement with 40 else-if parts and a nesting level of up to 10.
To provide help in debugging. This is minimal at the moment. A logging facility would be nice.
In the future I hope to get one of you to implement Java Bean behaviors so that students can drag-and-drop their way to creating a new agent.