Week 9 (emergence)

There are a couple different projects I've thought about which would be interesting. I might work to extend the inference model Frank and I made so that there are more turtles and they breed and die (generations). Not quite sure what I'd learn from that. To build on this, I think it would be really interesting to have some sort of genetic trait that would help with solving some specific problem. Whether this would be learning the most useful index for starting a partitioning algorithm or something completely different I don't know.

I'd also be interested in modeling the model for word of mouth epidemics that Malcolm Gladwell outlined in The Tipping Point. No idea what I'll actually do.

I would like to model the ways in which different areas of cities thrive or decline. This will probably involve some modification of the game of life, probably with a lot more variables. I don't know. I have to think about somehow incorporating agents into the model, as well, to describe the effect that populations have on this process...

I have a couple of ideas, but they're quite vague and I'm not sure how to write them in net logo. Two things that I read about fascinated me: the synchronization of biological oscillators and small-world networks. I could incorporate both of them but I want to keep it simple for now. I saw some good models in the library: fireflies, AIDS, dining philosophers (which seems too complicated for my tastes), small worlds, preferential attachment, etc. It's just difficult, trying to think of a simple way to incorporate the more interesting parts of them into my own model.

Maybe I could have a bunch of nodes in a circle (the number could be changed on a slide bar) and have x number of them be circles and the rest triangles. The circles could spread the message to turn into circles to its neighbors. The connections could be changed from run to run, so you could see how the message is transmitted. Maybe there could even be different rules, i.e. if you're already a circle and you receive a circle signal you could turn into yet another shape...? It's quite hard to picture in my head and I'm sure it's been done to death. Or perhaps I could have different groups or pairs with different variables (frequency, position, etc.) communicating and responding to each other, while plotting the variables to see what exactly is going on. This is going to take a while...