All,
For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models. Are there only a few basic types? Are many apparently different agent based models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle variations?
Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They argued that any such classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me argued that there MUST (note the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms. In ABM's, there must be "natural kinds". You should know that Me has never written a program longer than a seven line Word macro.
Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by his experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important. Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But for evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic classifications, the historical record of evolution. If we took this analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on the code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary case.
But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a dark art of classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution. Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics of abm's look like? And should we care about it?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,