Re: Simulating Individual Behavior

[Ginger Booth]

Paul and Phillippe and Mike and Chris,

    I've been enjoying this thread a great deal.  From my ecology model,
I have been somewhat frustrated by the lack of the kind of data I wanted,
but in practice, taking the tiniest bit of relevant detail, instead
of all possible detail, buys a lot....  You really get to see what the 
ramifications are of that seemingly little detail.  And there are a lot of
those little details "we all know", but haven't necessarily realized how
important they are.

    As a trivial example, when deciding a herbivore's freedom of movement
per round, I found that ~215 degrees (similar to a vision path) worked really
well, and the "obvious" 360 degrees (random direction) was devastating to the
plants.  Gecko tells me these crazy things a lot, and I'm forced to think it
through and hunt data.

    Another one I just ran into (predictably, while trying to do something
else that Gecko balked at ;), was that my crazy program told me that terrestrial
producers should be more productive than aquatic.  "Dim-witted bug-generator!"
I muttered....  However, to settle the argument, I got the data.  Though I'd 
always "known" that oceanic plankton were "of course" the dominant producers on 
earth, turns out I was wrong.  The "dim-witted bug-generator" was right.  If
it's right for the right reasons (always a danger, being right for the wrong
reason ;), I accidentally found something out that really matters to ecological
policy!  For it suggests what kind of terrestrial ecosystems (rather safer
and easier to manipulate than open ocean :) could conceivably offset CO2 
emissions.  Assuming I could prove it, of course....

    In other words (Chris's :):

>   So - again, I don't think of this as a problem, but a feature
>   of these models......and I don't think of it as unique to 
>   ABM models, per se - I think new tools often offer us new
>   "opportunities" to collect data...

Ditto.

Cheers,
    Ginger
    


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