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, there's that old chestnut: these models explain, not predict. Do we still believe this? I agree - they do not predict, but do they even explain? I'm getting increasingly troubled about this whole notion that the rules the researcher puts in the agents actually have some sort of analog in actual people. Even when conclusions are presented as "this is AN explanation" not "this is THE explanation", I suspect that the ABM researcher is being somewhat optimistic. So what is the relationship between the rules in the artificial agents and the rules in real people? Robert
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