So that's it for unit 8 in Introduction to Agent Based Modelling
where we kind of took you through a couple of vignettes
related to the history of agent based modelling
now I want to just reiterate what I said at the very beginning
This is one particular take on different factors that influence
agent based modelling
There are definitely some elements that we've left out of this story
that if you are really interested in, I would recommend that you look into
Probably most notably, the history of individual
based modelling from the ecological systems
literature and more recent work on artificial life
Most of the stories we've told here kind of end about the time
that agent based modelling starts to take off - late '90's, early 2000
but there has been history since then, obviously
so looking into some of that would be interesting as well
as a quick wrap-up, to remind you that we've talked about things like cellular automata
and its effect on building up this idea that you have this kind of quick rose
and they interact with each other.
we've talked about genetic algorithms and adaptive agents
this idea that agents don't have to take the same actions,
given past history that they've seen
we've talked about Logo and its direct impact on NetLogo
but also on, in general the idea of synthetic body reasoning
and the idea that you can think of yourself as an agent when you
build an agent based model
that helps you to build the model and to understand
a model that someone else has built for you.
Object Oriented Programming and the notions
about encapsulating methods and data within a single class or object of an entity
and then parallelism and the idea that you can have
multiple agents moving simultaneously
particle systems, where you have the first notions
of the idea that you can
simulate the many different actions by looking at their
emergent properties, how they interact
you see something different than what you see
when you look at one individual entity
so there's a rich history here
it's not a linear history
it's a not-so-linear interacting web of stories that
come together to create a lot of the stuff that
we talk about when we talk about
agent-based modelling
I hope that you've enjoyed this brief -
way too brief tour and that you understand
a little bit more about some of the places that
agent-based modelling comes out of.
Thanks.