3-Year Plan 2022-2024

I am publishing this agenda at the beginning of the next 3 year period, which is better as a guideline but also means that surprises are more likely to happen along the way. The theme of the previous period was CLAIRE 4 (moving to Go) which is happily completed while the theme of the period before that (2016-2018) was Knomee. Knomee is not dead, it is on hold while I keep using it and looking for better user experience at the same time.

The theme of the next three years is "Global Warming Dynamic Games", coming back to a topic that got me really excited 12 years ago. My goal is to make this work available as a game, which is why freshening up CLAIRE to get a modern development platform was necessary.

As always, I like to depict this research plan with three chapters:

• CLAIRE4 as a server 

• Global Warming Dynamic Games : a new model

• A web-app game to showcase evolutionary game theory applied to global warming

Note : this is the first version of February 13th 2022. 

1. CLAIRE 4 as a Web Server

2020 major decision was to revive CLAIRE with a new version based on Go, that will become the platform for my future projects. I picked Go as the underlying language to get a stable foundation and to leverage the tools and community.  The next 3 years should allow me to set up claire as a “server side” language, with the required support for writing  internet server apps, such as public games. I see three necessary steps:

• • Graduate CLAIRE4(go) to beta (this summer) then to stable release (end of year).
    Because CLAIRE is written with CLAIRE and goes through many loops of bootstrapping, the compiler and the interpreted have been fairly intensely tested in 2021. In addition, I have a significant non-regression tests library accumulated over the years. However, my previous experience (CLAIRE is close to 30 years old) shows that stability will only come after a few new major projects have been developed with CLAIRE4.

  • Integrate with Go to create a server (same inspiration as CLAIRE XL twenty years ago). However my goal is to keep CLAIRE “as small as possible” and to leave the exploration of “larger scale extensions” to others (this is why CLAIRE 4 is an open source project on GitHub). This was one of the reason to select Go in the first place (one of the most popular languages at Google and used for many server applications, there is wealth of libraries/tools to develop a REST/JSON web server. Hopefully, this should be my 2022 summer project.

  • Showcase this server environment with a “CLAIRE cloud IDE” that would allow me to develop on my smartphone or my tablet.
    As I write this, I envision this IDE (together with a Visual Studio Editor mode for CLAIRE) a 2023 project.

2. GWDG : Global Warming Dynamic Games

First, it is fait to say that I was hoping to start this earlier (cf. my previous plan) but the combination of CLAIRE4 and the book kept me busy.

The fact that William Nordhaus got his "Nobel" prize in 2018 because of his similar work on Earth-Humanity coupling is one of the many reasons to get back to this topic. As time passes and the GIEC model become more accurate, sophisticated and alarming, it is fair to assume that the climate models are right and what matters now is the much more challenging question of the "Humanity" model, that is, how will people react to warming, what will change in our behaviors (either through political change, unrest or forced change - the laws of physics).

The crude model of 2009 can be improved easily today because this topic has received much more attention since then. Thus my plan for the next three year is:

1. To work of a short bibliographic survey of "macro-coupling models".     It is striking to me that there is now a Wikipedia entry for "Global Warming Game". I need to read a few paper before I return to the design board. To make GSDW work; I also need to update the climate macro model that that I can capture the current GIEC scenarios.

2. To refresh the GWDG in two directions : First, make it a macro-model so that the hypothesis of other scientists may be "played" with the GWDG game - second, instantiate with a more accurate "default" model of the world economy and geo-politics. This new model is called CCEM and it has its own website.

3. To extract the GTES framework for the previous code base. GWDG is one of the many GTES application that I have developed over the past 20 years (cf the CSDM paper). My goal has always been to make GTES available as a public framework, but I wanted to have a robust & stable version of CLAIRE before that. This is now possible with CLAIRE4.The software engineering effort to separate between the GTES framework and the GWDG instantiation should also provide better agility and maintainability in the future.

3. Create a game to showcase GWDG

The Knomee project (2015-2018) has been a great learning experience, I plan to do the same with GWDG and derive a game, proposed as a Web App. It is an opportunity to learn about “browser client / claire server” architecture. It is also a way to expose and disseminate findings about game theory applied to global warming.

• Develop a Web front end.
  I see this a part of my software training, the same way that I learned a lot using XCode, Swift and iOS for Knomee.

• Make it into a game.
  This is the fun part. I envision two aspects :

  1. 1. 1. 1. play against  other players or against the embedded AI (since GTES is an AI by construction) for a given scenario.
              This is the easy part, each meta-model is randomize, so a "game board" is the combination of a meta-model together with parameter instantiation. The game player choses a continent/country and tries to define the best strategy. The Web game structure supports all kinds of configurations: playing for the highest competitive score, playing against each other, etc.

           2. play scenarios against each other to reflect about models.
              This only works if the components of the meta-model can be properly explained with the appropriate references to published work. This is where the bibliographic phase of 2022 is so important.

• Host it and launch it (same as Knomee : learning experience).

This third part will start next year and will be the focus of 2024.