http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/26/0126244
And closer to home, another news bit about my old alma mater:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/26/034207
In this latter article, the text of the classified email that was recently
sent by a LANL employee over open networks
What kind of explanation of social behavior would satisfy you?
On Jun 26, 2007, at 8:31 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:
Epstein has a new book and MIT Tech Review are running an article
on artificial societies on the back of it
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18880/page1/
And again,
From the article:
Artificial society modeling allows us to 'grow' social structures /in
silico/ demonstrating that certain sets of microspecifications are
/sufficient to generate/ the macrophenomena of interest.
The issue hinges on what sufficient to generate means for a
particular model in
Carl's comments seem to clarify much in my rather ignorant mind. As a
relative newcomer to complexity theory, it seems to me that the great advantage
of
complexity modeling and ABMs is that they provide new tools to examine
processes. tools that are quicker and more elegant than
Good question - an explanation that's grounded in actual field research I
guess.
IMHO, an ABM can never offer an explanation for a social behaviour. All it
can ever do (and I'm not being dismissive, I think this is important) is
offer a suggestion for an explanation that can subsequently be
On Jun 26, 2007, at 8:31 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:
Epstein has a new book and MIT Tech Review are running an article on
artificial societies on the back of it
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18880/page1/
Well, I bought the book, because of our teaching the SFI modeling
section, and
