Doing serious simulation work requires a considerable amount of statistics for calibrating models, designing experiments, performing sensitivity analyses, reducing data, exploring the results of simulation runs and much more. NetLogo is Java based, has an intuitive GUI, ships with dozens of useful sample models, is easy to program, and is available under the GPL 2 license.Īs you might expect, R is a perfect complement for NetLogo. agents are called turtles) that was designed for teaching children, has apparently become a defacto standard. There are now dozens of platforms for building ABMs, and it is somewhat surprising that NetLogo, a tool with some whimsical terminology (e.g. (Note that when asked about how one would calibrate such a model Doyne explains the need to collect massive amounts of data on individuals.)įortunately, the tools for building ABMs seem to be keeping pace with the ambition of the modelers. in the following clip of a 2006 interview, Doyne talks about building ABMs to explain the role of subprime mortgages on the Housing Crisis. No less of a complexity scientist than Doyne Farmer (of Dynamic Systems and Prediction Company fame) has argued in Nature for using ABMs to model the complexity of the US economy, and has published on using ABMs to drive investment models. Now, people are using ABMs for serious studies in economics, sociology, ecology, socio-psychology, anthropology, marketing and many other fields. What kinds of patterns and behaviors would emerge if you just let the simulation run? Could you guess a set of rules that would mimic some part of the real world? This dream is probably much older than the digital computer, but according to Jan Thiele’s brief account of the history of ABMs that begins his recent paper, R Marries NetLogo: Introduction to the RNetLogo Package in the Journal of Statistical Software, academic work with ABMs didn’t really take off until the late 1990s. Imagine creating a world populated with hundreds, or even thousands of agents, interacting with each other and with the environment according to their own simple rules. If I had to pick just one application to be the “killer app” for the digital computer I would probably choose Agent Based Modeling (ABM).

R studio agent