Spatial Simulations and Games - 2001

Spatial Simulations and Games - 2001

Class Project


	WINDOWS APPLICATIONS One or more working demonstrations of the ideas you are dealing with.	COMPUTATIONAL EPISTEMOLOGY How is your subject changing the way we describe, think about, practice and explain things?
	SOCIAL-CULTURAL-SPATIAL THEORY What social and cultural objects and processes are represented? How do they operate?	EVOLUTIONARY TRAJECTORY Your subject in the context of past, present and future cultural ideas and technology.

The materials for this course were selected to give you an overview of the potential of Spatial Simulations and Games as ways of describing, knowing and explaining complex social and geographic phenomena. They span the fields of Artificial Life (to include Artificial Societies & Artificial Culture), Autonomous Agents (to include multple agents) and Evolutionary Computation to unearth the philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of a variety of researchers in complexity spanning the creative sciences, humanities and arts. They should help you integrate ideas about sociality with the technologies of computation. The weekly challenges are intended to familiarize you with the languages that may be used in describing the interaction of agents, space and time and how one might begin to describe the social world around us computationally.

Precisely what constitutes an "agent" and an "interaction" depends upon the scale of your field of study (see Powers of Ten). Agents may be subatomic particles, atoms and molecules, or living things: cells, organs, individuals, families, groups, towns, corporations, cities, states and larger alliances. Agents may also be artificial technological things such as images, sounds, commodities, money or artifacts of any kind. Interactions may be any processes that take place among the agents. We will concentrate on agents and interactions that share properties and processes with the things we study in social science. Our agents should sense their surroundings, think about what they sense, and then implement some action. This cognitive structure is called a sense-think-act, or STA, architecture. As we are, our agents should neither be omniscient nor possess a global knowledge, rather they should act on limited and local knowledge. We can't climb high enough to see and understand everything at once. From the smallest sub-atomic forces to the largest cosmos we seek to understand how so many local interactions combine to produce level upon level of unexpected activity.

In this project you have an opportunity to focus on a specific application of social and cultural modeling.

interacting agents on an application of your choice. You might wish to explore how different perceptions, beliefs and actions might effect a group's behavior. Alternatively, you might wish to know how uniformity of though might effect a social situation. You may wish to understand how ideas reproduce, recombine and are retained or discarded. You might wish explore the analogy between the Darwin/Wallace theory of evolution by natural selection and the evolution of learning. You are free to use your imagination in choosing a project topic. Your topic should include aspects of multiple agency, complexity, emergence and evolution. Feel free to stretch social and cultural concepts beyond the social sciences into the natural sciences, arts and engineering.

You should engage in a critical and epistemological analysis and/or experiment with some class of social spatial simulation or game. Although other topics are acceptable, you might focus on an article from any of the following conference proceedings:

You might also focus on any of the required or recommended readings:

Gary William Flake's COMPUTATIONAL BEAUTY OF NATURE, e.g. recreate any of his examples as a Borland Windows application.
Marc Damashek's N-GRAMS, e.g. recreate this as a Borland Windows application.

You might focus on creating applications for the following physical systems:

You should provide an evolutionary perspective on the topic:

As a background to and foundation for your area of interest, explain the cultural and technological contexts of the past leading up to the present "state-of-the-art." Who has pioneered in the field. What have been the notable successes and failures? What have been the issues surrounding the work? Who tried to carry it forward and why? Who tried to quash it and why? Provide us with a prelude to the situation that exists today.
What is the present "state-of-the-art?" What is the "cutting" or "bleeding-edge?" What is the "Holy Grail?" Again explain the cultural and technological contexts of what is going on today.
Again what cultural and technological changes will determine where we're going? What are the possible and probable futures? What are the risks and payoffs?

You should describe the computational basis of the model and how it works:

Write a verbal description of the class of social or cultural phenomenon you have chosen as a challenge.
Refine the description and decompose it into its constituent parts: agents, processes and environments.
What computational representations will you need? What variables, functions, algorithms will you need?
Construct your model in some pseudocode.
You may wish to program parts of your model as Windows applications.
You may wish to build a complete working Windows simulation.