[FRIAM] The art of agent-based modeling

[Jochen Fromm]

So even if an agent-based model is not realistic enough
to be verified directly by experimental data and if
the simple agents we 'send forth to do battle in our 
models' do not produce the same collective behavior as the 
apparently real agents, the agent-based model could 
serve as a metaphor to understand something. Right ?
Finding new metaphors is indeed something what both great 
science and great art do, and since Lakoff's book 
"Metaphors We Live By" we know that metaphors are more 
than rhetorical elements. 

-J.

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Agar
Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 5:58 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The art of agent-based modeling

I'd change this to

How do we make clear the core of a problem through constructing an  
illustration of our own beliefs and assumptions

and say that's exactly what both great science and great art do.  
Science then has the obligation to challenge it against new instances  
of the problem in the classic Popperian way.

Mike