[SwarmFest2004] SwarmFest2004 - Presentation Abstract

[Greg Madey]

The Computer Experiment in Computational Social Science

The year 2003 was the 50th anniversary of the invention of the 
"computer experiment" by Fermi, Pasta and Ulam. The computer experiment 
was offered as the third way of doing science at the time. In Kuhn's 
normal science, the scientific method suggests the generation of new 
knowledge by making observations of a phenomenon, identifying curious 
aspects of the phenomenon, generating a falsifiable hypothesis to 
explain the phenomenon, and designing an expermiment to disprove the 
hyposthesis (Popper 1982). Should the experiment fail (to disprove the 
hypothesis) it is accepted as an explanatory model until eventually 
replaced by something better. Fermi et al proposed the use of the 
computer experiment for inquiry into the physical sciences where the 
phenomenon cannot or is not easily observed. Over the last decade 
various social science disciplines, including political science, 
anthropology, sociology, and organizational science began to embrace 
simulation as one method of inquiry in what is sometimes called 
computation social science. Recently, Axelrod (1997), McKelvey (1999), 
Goldspink (2002), Kluver et al (2003) and many others have explored the 
role of computer simulation as a source of new knowledge in the social 
sciences. We integrate their analysis and present another view of 
computer simulation as part of the classical scientific method applied 
to the investigation of social systems. The hypothesis of the classical 
scienfic method becomes the conceptual model of the social scientists, 
which in turn is implemented in a computer simulation. Computer 
experiments are conducted using those computer simulations.

Greg Madey
Computer Science & Engineering
University of Notre Dame
address@hidden

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