Re: Considering a new project & wanting something for nothing

[John W. Fondon III (Trey)]

Paul,
    Your project has captured my interest.  A few questions centering around
"agreement" and "knowledge":  How rich will these be?  It would seem to me
that the most interesting behaviors would be likely to arise if these
quantities had high dimensionality (dimensions corresponding to "topics") to
allow for specialization.  Also, Why should individuals prefer to speak with
individuals that agree with them (I find these discussions the least
"pleasurable")?  Perhaps another quantity, "interest" would be useful for
generating cool behaviors; individuals with a high interest in a particular
topic would seek out individuals with a high knowledge in that topic.  The
topic discussed b/t the individuals would be a function of each's interests
and knowledge.  Would knowledge be limited, finite, created or destroyed?  A
good model might be for knowledge to decay with time, but how would new
knowledge be created?  A "library"?  Changing interests?  Stagnating
interactions?

This sounds like a very cool project, and I'd be willing to bet that you
will get some very interesting dynamics out of it...

regards,
Trey

John W. Fondon III (Trey)
UT Southwestern Medical Center
Dallas, Texas
address@hidden
address@hidden
address@hidden
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Johnson <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden <address@hidden>
Date: Wednesday, June 09, 1999 5:13 PM
Subject: Considering a new project & wanting something for nothing


>
>Last fall, I signed up to give a paper at a meeting that will be held
>this fall.  The paper is about different models of opinion formation and
>social influence and one variant that I'm considering now goes roughly
>like this.  We want
>   1. Individuals who look about for "discussion partners".  They search
>within a "neighborhood" for people they expect will give pleasant
>conversation.  They choose at random among all targets that are equally
>likely to be pleasant.  Pleasant is some combination of agreement with
>own opinion and usefulness in other respects (they may have a hamburger
>you want, etc.)
>   2. There can be discussion between the partners and certain amounts
>of information revealed.  A friend who is a professor at Indiana has
>done lots of empirical work and claims that the other person's opinion
>will have more impact if that person is seen as knowledgable, for
>example.  There are plenty of little details that may have to be ignored
>in the model.
>   3. On the basis of their discussion, individuals can change their
>opinions.  Their knowledge level may be incremented as well, if they
>were a less knowledgable person talking to a more knowledgable person.
>   4. Then they proceed to look for more discussion partners.  There has
>to be some ingredient that creates a tendency to go back to the same
>discussion partners, but also a willingness to look for new ones.
>
>I have been thinking about this for a little while, but didn't work yet
>on designing a simulation.  If you have ideas about it, I'd be glad to
>hear.
>
>Anyway, I got to looking at an app that Pietro Terna is distributing
>called LangtonAntSpace.  I've got version 0.8, but there may be newer
>ones. Anyway, he has an updated version of Sven's upgraded MoGrid2d
>class in there.  That is a  class in which there is a 2d grid, and at
>each one there can be a list of occupants.  The class looks to be well
>designed (thanks, Sven) and updated (thanks Pietro).  Takes into account
>Swarmlib changes through 1.4.
>
>So I got to thinking like this.  What if the world of each agent is
>thought of as a MoGrid2d, and an agent can enter a space on the lattice,
>and then discuss with some elements from the list, then form an opinion
>about the people in that space, and possibly decide to stay or go.  If
>the agent stays, then its participation will affect other agents looking
>to move as well.
>
>Then I started to wonder how I would design record-keeping for each
>agent, a tally of experiences in each cell.  I think I would create a
>Tally object for each cell visited, and in there store whatever
>information was obtained.
>
>I started thinking about creating a Grid2D object inside each agent and
>hanging the Tally objects on the right spots. (Even though the Grid2D
>documentation says it is a space for agents, I don't think it would mind
>holding some other kinds of objects :).
>
>But then I wondered if there is a way to get something for nothing.
>Since the MoGrid2d class can answer a message like "getListatX:Y:", and
>it returns a Swarm list object, it seems like I'm getting something for
>nothing by using a Swarm Map with the return from "getListatX:Y:" as the
>key and the Tally object as the item.  I don't have to allocate any
>dynamic memory that way, but I do pay a performance penalty of slow
>searches through the Map for a particular list.
>
>I see a major danger in either of these approaches, however. If a spot
>in the MoGrid2d goes "empty" after an agent has been there, then the
>agent will still possess a Tally for that spot, even though the spot
>does not exist.  If an interation over a Map tries to use a key that no
>longer exists, I think that agent would meet Mr. Segmentation Fault.
>
>But I don't want to have the MoGrid2d class having to notify every agent
>when a list goes empty in the grid, right?
>
>
>--
>Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
>Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
>University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
>Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700
>
>
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   please send a message to <address@hidden> with "help" in the
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