I don't think you'll find this because it implies programming a higher purpose and allowing the agents to jump the rails, as it were, and start negotiating their way through the combinatorics of alternative networks. Similarly, you won't find models in which agents invent new inputs to monitor, new outputs to generate, and new rules which involve new inputs and new outputs.
Optimization within a fixed solution space, which is what we do when we let agents play with the flow through a fixed network or let them search out the most profitable rules in a set of prespecified alternatives, gets hairy enough without opening things up to the infinity of potential solutions that we didn't have time to program into the model ourselves. Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem has some discussions, central to the plot, about how the human mind filters the combinatorically possible down to the mechanically feasible and further down to the set of outcomes worth thinking about. It's not obvious how to program the same capabilities without the teaching the agents how to apply the same common sense and expert senses which the programmer uses to frame a fixed solution space. -- rec -- On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 6:48 AM, Russ Abbott <[email protected]> wrote: > In a discussion with a colleague today we talked briefly about stocks and > flows networks. It struck me that a stocks and flows model is a limited sort > of service-oriented agent-based model. In a service-oriented agent-based > model, agents accept inputs and produce outputs -- the simplest version > being a supply chain. That's really a stocks and flows model in which the > agents control the flows. Important differences are: > > - In an agent-based model, the agents are assumed to be autonomous in > various ways. In a stocks and flows model the flow rates are not > autonomous. > The flow rates are equations that don't have the ability to change > themselves.They are assumed to be facts about the nature of the domain > being > modeled. > > > - In a service-oriented agent-based model the agents have the ability > to reconfigure themselves dynamically and perhaps even to add new agents > and > new stock nodes. In a stocks and flows model, the structure of the network > static. > > So this raises the question whether anyone knows of any work in stocks and > flows modeling that addresses stocks and flows networks that are flexible in > the ways just mentioned. > > -- Russ > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
