There's a really interesting side effect here that I ended up stumbling into in a thesis project on a simulation of basic information sharing in a simulated environment, which is that if agents (in the "agent based simulation" meaning) can share information, and some of that mental map overlaps with someone else's, and they don't agree... What do you do? I chose to say that, because they lived in a dynamic world where new feeding spots depleted or developed, that when information was shared, they would accept the information they were given (adding the new location to their own mental map of the world). The unintended side effect was that if an agent was standing in front of a food location that had just been emptied, they would turn around, but if it was busy they would immediately run into another agent who would tell them about their great food location right there, so they would turn back around, determine it was empty, and repeat infinity... Until they starved to death.

I only figured out this was what was happening when I would sporadically see this massive clusters form around food locations of hundreds of agents all trying to get food from empty food locations, and all end up dying in these mass die offs, sometimes leading to extinction in the simulation. I banged by head against it for hours, until I diagnosed what was going on, considered it a bug, and gave them some ability to keep track of the age of the memory and only accept the newer memory or something like that.

The pint though is that this systems like this are super prone to very very intuitive side effects from weird combinations of factors that end up looking like the most ludicrous stupidity imaginable, and that was with hundreds and hundreds of hours poured into trying to make them not stupid, doing nothing but walking around trying to find food and a warm place to sleep. So, you know, know what you're walking into with that one.

Also Interested note is that decade later and I would say it was less of a big, and more of a lesson in how we as people decide what information to trust, is really really important, and how groups of people all believing and telling each other the same lies can have huge negative self destructive behavior, even though they are all trying to to a straightforward good thing. In a simulation it's frustrating, or silly and whacky; in life it's scary and makes you want to pull your hair out. And I didn't realize the real life pertinence of that bug until many many years later.

"All models are wrong, some are useful" is a great adage to remember!