Thank you, Günther. Consider joining ESSA ;-)
Even better, put this on your calendar:
2nd World Congress on Social Simulation
George Mason University
July 2008
Bring your friends too and meet Team MASON
Claudio
--
Claudio Cioffi-Revilla
Professor of Computational Social Sciences
Director, Center for Social Complexity
Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University
Research-1 Bldg MS 6B2, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030 U.S.A.
tel (703) 993-1402, fax (703) 993-1399, [log in to unmask]
Center & Grad Program http://socialcomplexity.gmu.edu
MASON Project http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/
on 9/28/06 6:20 AM, Günther Greindl at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Hello Sean, Tony, Claudio, Mike,
>
> thank you all for your answers, community = top notch :-))
>
> * Claudio wrote:
>> you should consider MASON if you need:
>> -replicability guarantee
>> -computational and visualization separation for
>> -lots of runs (>103) without viz every run ;-)
>> -checkpointing for stats analysis
>> -evolutionary computational methods, as common for assessing learning.
>
> That is indeed exactly what I need. Especially visualization is very
> important, as I want to experiment with a few different approaches here.
>
>> We will make sure to send you the revised
>> paper as we develop it.
>
> Please do, I would be very glad, I've already printed the paper and am
> currently reading it :-)
>
>> Both Epstein and Axtell
>> (now at our Center, no longer Brookings) provided input.
>
> Wow. Cool! :-) I thoroughly enjoyed their Sugarscape book and it was
> a source of great inspiration.
>
> * Tony wrote
>
>> I'm just about to release my source code (refreshing it for MASON 11
>> and doing general cleanup/commenting) and you'll be welcome to look at
>> or use it. I implemented 70-75% of the rules and outcomes in Growing
>> Artificial Societies.
>
> I'm looking forward to your code.
>
>> Any kind of complex cognitive architecture will fly against the
>> philosophy of Sugarscape, but is interesting that the agents have no
>> overt memory to use in reasoning/(ir)rational decision making.
>
> That is the big question - of course, the traditional CAS approach is
> to keep the individual components simple. But in the social simulation
> community voices have been raised (and I tend to concur - with reservations
> ;-) -
> that to make sensible descriptions of human societies one cannot completely
> neglect the cognitive aspect.
>
> I think one should iterete into more complex agents slowly, and see what
> happens.
> Generative science in the best sense ;-)
>
>> As agents/models become more complex they will
>> become more difficult to understand and in turn establishing causality
>> between code and simulation outcomes. Given the very little
>> replication that has occurred in this field, in general, there are many
>> open questions.
>
> That is quite true. I am just starting out with my Ph.D on this topic
> (cultural diffusion modeling), and I'm not yet sure where it will take me -
> more into the philosophy of science section, as in "how applicable are the
> results", "is generative science real science" etc; or into the design of
> cognitive agents useful for simulation; or a return to the simple agent and
> adjusting the interplay of agents. All exciting questions :-)
>
> One more thing: what I certainly intend to do is distribute the simulation
> in a second step (long term goal); if I use cognitive agents, there will be no
> other way to do simulation sensibly - does MASON lend itself easily to this?
>
> I know that you can add distributed support to Repast Models quite easily.
>
> Kind Regards and thank you for your responses,
> Günther
>
> P.S.
>> Alles gut
>> Claudio
>
> Danke :-)
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