[Swarm-Modelling] New book on modeling history

[Steve Railsback]

Here is a new book about modeling history (especially, the growth and 
contraction of European nations).

http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7690.html

The author, Peter Turchin, is actually an ecologist, and he apparently 
relies mainly on the modeling approaches of classical ecology. However, 
in his introductory chapter (which can be downloaded from the above 
site) he at least considers agent-based simulation and says good things 
about the ABS work of Kohler et al.

The drawback of ABS mentioned most prominently by Turchin is:
"Currently, there is no unified language for describing ABSs, making 
each particular model opaque to everybody except those who are steeped 
in the particular computer language the model is implemented in. Small 
details of implementation may result in big differences in the predicted 
dynamics" This is, of course, why we use tools like Swarm.

Steve R.