[Swarm-Modelling] GEPR on life-cycle requirements

[Daniel Calhoun]

[Please redirect this message if appropriate.]

 

Please allow an outsider to comment on the implications of GEPR's analogies in his life-cycle message. The analogies are attractive.  They may also offer a will-of-the-wisp.  

 

I speak as someone who worked with both Swarm and Repast, several years ago, to do ethnohistorical models of trade and band-survival patterns in a plains-like environment.  To make this increasingly interesting would have required modelling something like speciation or ethnogenesis.  John Holland never really produced this.  For that reason, the rhetoric of GEPR's analogies is enticing.  It actually hints at producing emergent species that are not encompassed by (that is, in the ugly word, "built in by") a naive pre-specification of the outcome.  Like a novel species among the fish in a modelled stream.

 

Perhaps a more careful analogy would keep things within bounds.

 

-- Daniel Calhoun

address@hidden

14067 Sosna Way, Guerneville CA 95446