Ideas for visual field representation??

[Carmen Smith]

Hi, I am working on a project that involves a simple stimulus-response agent which much navigate it's way around a 2d grid world.

Does anyone have any good ideas for ways to implement the agent's visual field? The input is a string of characters, one of them representing the position of the agent, which would be a 4x5 visual field if fed into a matrix.
The world consists of random walls with doors and hidden keys.

If I were to go with the matrix, is there an efficient way to update information from the new visual field string (which gets updated every time the agent makes a move) ?
Thanks for your help!

[GDICommander]

This is not a C++ question. Just think about how you will represent it and if you have problems with C++, your post will be more likely to be solved.

For the update, do a search on the Observer design pattern. That will be a good start.

[Carmen Smith]

thank you GDICommander