Okay, in our last little vignette into the
history of agent-bnased modelling, we're
going to talk about particle systems
and computer graphics. So, early on
in computer graphics, visualisations were essentially
accompalished by creating large, flat surfaces
and then combining in ways to create what was
computer grpahics. And to tis day, a lot of
computer grpahics is still done that way.
Like you place textures on these polygons and you place them
But there's another way to do graphics, which is
to think of graphics, not as a polygon
but just as a point, and you give that point a size.
But your'e essentially mani;ulating the centre of that
point rather than manipulating all four corners
of a square....
and in fact, surfaces don't work very well for smoke, stars
light or even birds, for that matter. So, instead you need
some soft of point representation
as we talked about. And this point
representation of graphics came to
be known as particle systems. And what's
interesting is that once that you think
of these things as points, well a lot of our physics models
are actually written as points, as idealised points
so then you can apply those physics models to computer
graphics in a very easy and intuitive
way and you can create interesting displays.
in computer graphics. So, how does this
relate to ABM? Well, particle systems
also exhibit emergent phenomenon. So, for example, if I'm
representing a bunch of
red particles as a fire, then when they overlap,
depending on how I've done the transparecies, they
appear denser of lighter so I can get
this like flickering flame like effect htat looks
very similar to a fire, right.