Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Re: [Swarm-Support] Repast vs. Swarm

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Anju Dahiya wrote, quoting Helen Couclelis:

> “Agent-based modeling meets an intuitive desire to explicitly 
> represent humandecision making when modeling systems where we know for 
> a fact that human decision making plays a major role. However, by 
> doing so, the well-known problems of modeling a highly complex, 
> dynamic spatial environment are compounded by the problems of modeling 
> highly complex, dynamic decision-making units interacting with that 
> environment and among themselves in highly complex, dynamic ways. The 
> question is whether the benefits of that approach to spatial modeling 
> exceed the considerable costs of the added dimensions of complexity 
> introduced into the modeling effort. The answer is far from clear and 
> in, my mind, it is in the negative. But then I am open to being 
> persuaded otherwise”.

Spatial data mining can certainly be complex by itself. But it's hard to 
infer from a dataset the possibility of, say, cycles of movement of 
agents, without lots of finely-spaced snaphots in time. Given 
constraints about the overall movements, just throwing the idea against 
the wall and seeing how it would work on the landscape with a simulation 
using reasonable, constrained ranges of parameters can be easier and 
more convincing than an (also imperfect) inference.