[FRIAM] Agar's Bold Conjectures and Refutations

[Stephen Guerin]

Nick writes:
> So then the question would be, under what conditions do we 
> accept that when the simple agents that we send forth to do 
> battle in our models product the same collective behavior as 
> the apparently real agents we see around us, that the real 
> agents actually behave by the same underlying rules as the 
> our created ones?

I think a good modeling team will have two parallel tracks going when
constructing/validating the model:

The first would be qualitative research at the micro level. Observing agent
behaviors in the real world. While there is the challenge of many-to-many
relationship between micro rules and macro behavior, grounding your model in
qualitative research at the micro level can help reduce the ensemble of possible
micro rules.

The second parallel track would be at the macro level where the observer may
rely more on Pierce's abductive logic
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning) than inductive/deductive
reasoning to generate hyptotheses about the micro rules that may generate the
macro dynamics. To me, the generative character of abductive logic is where the
creative bit is that resists reduction to methodology in the practice in ABM...

-Steve