[FRIAM] A billion agents

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Jochen Fromm wrote:
> Is a simulation with millions or billions of agents somehow 
> qualitative different from a simulation with only a few 
> thousand agents ? Certainly not if they are all alike, if 
> they all do the same or if they all "live" in the same 
> environment. 
It's not unusual to have semi-realistic landscape (e.g .from GIS data), 
and then have agents move around on that landscape.
So even though the overall population is very large the effective 
population acting on specific landscape over time is smaller.   To get 
good statistics on these smaller areas of interest, or various kinds of 
rare events can mean that the whole simulation has to be very big.