This weekend I had a bit of time to pick up my hobby horse of worrying about ways to simulate virtual societies at a relatively fine grained level. One of the big problems that I have grappled with in the past is how to make the population pyramid come out right in the absence of a very detailed model of nutrition, health, accidents and warfare. On ( Read more... )

As this article suggests, little has changed in the oil industry. Doing any exploration at all still costs a pile of money, and thinking that some unexpected change of events (e.g. doubling of the gas price) can cause the oil infrastructure to jump and to save the bacon of a lame-duck president's agenda, is either as purposefully misleading or as ( Read more... )

After reading a summary of some of the work of Ibn Khaldun while waiting for the kids to fall asleep at naptime, it occurred to me that one could use some of Ibn Khaldun's theories about how societies develop (evoluationarily, though he of course is not familiar with that term) to generate role playing worlds. Ibn Khaldun doesn't tell one how to do ( Read more... )

Having now faithfully slogged through two books on this, I can only repeat that I find most of this largely a disappointment. The book by Klaus Troitzsch and Nigel Gilbert, Simulation for the Social Scientist, is in the end a bit of a downer - despite the fun fact: they use LISP! After slogging through pages of equations to explain the statistics ( Read more... )

The latest Scientific American had an article on virtual archaeology, more precisely, on the used of agent-based simulations to formulate theories about settlement patterns. The basic idea of the article is to get a detailed map of an area (say, some valley in Middle America) that contains both environmental as well as archaeological information ( Read more... )