One of my projects

Posted by Parks, Raymond on Apr 04, 2007; 11:45pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/One-of-my-projects-tp523626p523646.html

Doug,

You wrote:
> One will seldom, if ever get identical behavior from two different
> codes, even if the inputs are identical.
 >
> The emergent behavior that could be observed from EpiSims, The SIMS, and
> Second Life, assuming the latter two could emulate responses to the
> introduction of a viral pathogen, will vary based directly on the
> differences of granularity with with the agents are implemented in the
> simulations.

   Given that the "agents" in The Sims and Second Life are avatars for
real people, one could argue that their code is more realistic than
agent code.  Their granularity is basically as small as one can get -
some MMORPGs allow for more than one character per player but they are
still one character per character.  One problem I can see would be that
MMORPGs in general suffer from the lack of full participation - EpiSims
models every second of human behaviour for a large population, but
MMORPG players are not playing their avatars all of the time.

   I wonder if some combination would play to the strengths of both
systems.  Could one use something like EpiSims running at wall-clock
speed as the background for avatars played by real people?  Then the
simulated people agent code could self-modify on the fly to model the
behaviour of the real people.  I'm starting to sound like the
explanation of the fake Rock Ridge in "Blazing Saddles".

--
Ray Parks                   rcparks at sandia.gov
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