Re: [Swarm-Modelling] newbie question

[Marcus G. Daniels]

alex dinovitser wrote:

> It appears to me that development in the project has
> slowed down if not stalled over the past 3 years. Is this true? if so, why?
>  
Quite correct!   The reason is no funding.  The reason for no funding is 
debatable, of course, but my take is that many people in serious 
scientific circles feel that agent based modelling is a dodgy scientific 
activity.  Too many free parameters, too many ways to make up nonsense 
stories for why simulations did what they did, no general theoretical 
way to know whether a given simulation configuration is the only way to 
get from some set of initial conditions to a result or one of a family 
of hundreds or millions of ways to get to a result.   This is assuming 
that the authors of a given computer simulation (in Swarm or whatever) 
come close to understanding what their program really does or even 
understand what they intend it to do.

Even if one limits the goal of a simulation to be illustrative of 
dynamics that challenge popular analytical techniques or assumptions of 
the possible, there is still the challenge to convince some people that 
the programs that generate these phenomena are correct and consistent 
enough to bother with.  Norms are needed in these academic communities 
for validation and verification and both are complicated tasks.  That 
kind of activity can be an unwelcome distraction to advocates and 
skeptics alike.