First meeting, 16 November 2010

Post date: Nov 18, 2010 12:19:35 PM

The session began with introductions and then a discussion of future topics we'd like to focus on, including:

• The general issue of understanding versus prediction.
• A session on Joshua's Epstein JASSS paper “Why model?” (in which he discusses 16 things you can do with a model other than prediction) and some of the responses to it.
• Pressures for simplicity versus complexity in modelling.
• A talk based on Eric Silverman's PhD thesis.
• A talk incorporating either Joe Viana's practice viva or a report on his thesis.
• A look at some of the papers coming out of Armando Geller's group at George Mason University: some very ambitious models being produced here.
• Possible session on the work of Lars-Erik Cederman, who models political conflicts.
• Ways of measuring overall system efficiency / happiness / success in social contexts.
• Ways of modelling human agents, and their decision-making strategies, when you don’t have complete data that would allow you to infer the details.

Jason Noble ran through a talk he gave at the recent World Congress on Social Simulation, on "Modelling academic research funding as a resource allocation problem." The interest in this paper was not so much for the specific content but more to serve as an example of a very simple model of a social mechanism design problem.