Agent Based Modeling

And now for something completely different. I was reading this book: "It's Alive" over the weekend. Particularly of interest to me was all the discussion about so-called "Agent Based Modeling." Agent based modeling is a big word for simulations used generally to research and understand systems involving many independent agents.

They often have very cool visual displays where you can see, variously the agents traversing their space, growing, reproducing, exchanging, consuming, etc. There are lots and lots of cool examples of this.

I thought that there had to be some framework that someone developed to make it 'easier' to create these models, and indeed, I found what looks like a really good one: AScape or Agent Scape. Reading about it reveals that it is open source and that it has been used in many real projects that you might have heard of. It looks very cool and useful.

Anyway, more on this new hobby of mine later 🙂