[Swarm-Modelling] Re: [Swarm-Support] IDEs - who is using what

[Darren Schreiber]

I came to ABM work with a pretty minimal set of programming skills  
(and I am still certainly not a skilled programmer).  What enabled me  
to get some success was that there was a good set of models written  
in Swarm that I could borrow from easily in order to not reinvent the  
wheel.  As I anticipate teaching agent-based modeling to aspiring  
political scientists in the not so distant future, I am pretty  
convinced that the current anarchic state you mention is an  
inhibition to the progress of ABMs in my field.  Game theory and  
statistics, both have standard ways of doing things that make it  
substantially easier to figure out what a person has done.  With  
ABMs, even very skilled programmers tell me about the difficulties  
they have in replicating results.

At a conference on "New Methods in Political Science" recently,  
someone was asking why ABM's still haven't had the payoff that was  
promised a decade ago in our field.  I believe this anarchic state  
and a continuing uncertainty about its epistemological foundations is  
the reason.

    Darren

[I'm hoping we can move this discussion to Swarm Modelling since  
there are people who monitor that list only who would likely have  
insights.]

>  I'd suggest not, because such a standardisation would impose the  
> wrong kind of constraint on the way we go about building models. If  
> we do standardise, I think it should be to constrain ourselves  
> methodologically rather than technologically.
>
> Gary
>
>
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