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Cellular Automata vs. Agent-Based Models
From: |
jalex |
Subject: |
Cellular Automata vs. Agent-Based Models |
Date: |
Fri, 1 Oct 1999 08:28:11 -0700 (PDT) |
Dawn Trembath writes:
>
> Maybe some direct questions would clear this up for me the fastest. Why
> was Swarm implemented using an Agent-Based approach as opposed to a very
> unrestricted CA approach?
I do not want to speak for the designers of Swarm, but let me
contribute my $.02 anyway.
Although I am not sure what you mean by an "unrestricted CA approach",
note that CA models assume the agents to be situated in a spatial
world of n-dimensions. Agent-based models, construing the term
"agent" broadly, need not occur in any explicit space.
Suppose you were modeling interactions between certain
political and economic institutions. In such a model, though the
agents are well-defined, as well as the relations among them, it would
likely be artificial to impose a spatial framework. The
agent-based approach adopted by Swarm allows the Swarm libraries to be
used as a foundation for such a model, whereas this might not be as
easy were Swarm built using a CA approach.
My point is that unrestricted CA's are a strict subset of
agent-based models. Given that, why not adopt the more general
approach, thereby making Swarm available to a larger body of users?
Cheers,
Jason Alexander
Logic & Philosophy of Science
University of California, Irvine
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