In an agent-based model, agents can pass information in arbitrarily complex webs of communication. In Conway’s Game of Life, information from other agents is restricted to just the neighboring eight cells. In an agent-based model, the state can be any data that describes the agent for instance, an agent that is used to represent a person could contain information about their age, height and salary. In Conway’s Game of Life, cells have a very simple state-they are either alive or dead. This means that agents themselves hold a state. In agent-based models, the agents are software entities, typically represented computationally as objects. How do ABMs work?Īgent-based modeling and simulation extends the foundational principles of Conway’s Game of Life. The simple ideas introduced by CA-stateful entities which update their states based on local information-underpin the much more advanced approach of agent-based modeling. The only way to generate them is to compute all the steps-a computational process called simulation. Interestingly, it’s impossible to know in advance what a starting configuration of the ‘Game of Life’ will generate the patterns produced are not arbitrary or predictable but are in fact undecidable. The complex patterns generated by the cells’ interactions are an example of “emergent” properties: properties of the whole system which do not belong to any of its parts. These simple rules generate complex patterns of movement for the system of cells which seemingly have a life of their own a life that is far removed from the simplicity of the four rules that govern the cells. The game proceeds iteratively-like a turn-based game-and at each turn every cell investigates the neighboring cells and updates according to the rules above.Įxtending the analogy to life, we can think of each turn as a generation of the population and the rules are applied repeatedly at each generation-you can see this in Figure 1.įigure 1: Conway’s Game of Life through time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |