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 :-)