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From: | Marcus G. Daniels |
Subject: | Re: [Swarm-Modelling] newbie question |
Date: | Fri, 28 Jan 2004 22:57:20 -0700 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 |
alex dinovitser wrote:
Quite correct! The reason is no funding. The reason for no funding is debatable, of course, but my take is that many people in serious scientific circles feel that agent based modelling is a dodgy scientific activity. Too many free parameters, too many ways to make up nonsense stories for why simulations did what they did, no general theoretical way to know whether a given simulation configuration is the only way to get from some set of initial conditions to a result or one of a family of hundreds or millions of ways to get to a result. This is assuming that the authors of a given computer simulation (in Swarm or whatever) come close to understanding what their program really does or even understand what they intend it to do.It appears to me that development in the project has slowed down if not stalled over the past 3 years. Is this true? if so, why?
Even if one limits the goal of a simulation to be illustrative of dynamics that challenge popular analytical techniques or assumptions of the possible, there is still the challenge to convince some people that the programs that generate these phenomena are correct and consistent enough to bother with. Norms are needed in these academic communities for validation and verification and both are complicated tasks. That kind of activity can be an unwelcome distraction to advocates and skeptics alike.
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