Hi, I'm Jackie Kazil, one of the original creators of Mesa.
And I'm Tom Pike. I'm one of the developers on Team Mesa,
and I'll be walking you through the tutorial.
Mesa is an open-source, Python 3 library
that allows users to quickly create agent-based models
using a decoupled architecture.
Mesa includes the ability to run browser-based visualisations,
but also the ability to run headless.
Being built in Python, it gives users the ability to take advantage of
other tools in the Python ecosystem for data handling
such as Pandas, NetworkX, Jupyter notebooks, and more.
Over the next several lessons,
in order to learn some Mesa, some Python,
and some things about agent-based modelling,
we'll be building the seminal model
'Sugarscape with Traders',
created by Rob Axtell and Josh Epstein.
In order to do this, I'll be demonstrating the code
through Google's Jupyter environment, which is known as Colab.
This is free to anyone with a Google account,
although you can use
whichever integrated development environment you would like.
Each session of code will be available
through Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Explorer GitHub
and all the code is available in .py files
through Mesa's examples repositories,
found on its GitHub page.
In the first lesson, we'll be talking to Rob Axtell,
one of the co-creators of the Sugarscape model.
As you move through the lessons,
please don't hesitate to ask questions.
We hope you enjoy this tutorial.