Electric Archaeology: Digital Media for Learning and Research

Discussion

Shawn

I would be interested to know what your impressions/comments/questions are regarding my agent modeling…

6 Comments »

  1. Learning from your Traveller Sm model is truly interesting regarding mostly my purpose of my ABM, which will incorporate some of your suggestions and intuitions.
    But I have to say I not agree with the third point of the starting model, “the size of the settlement is relate to the importance of it”, if it’s true for the real world and also, I really don’t know very much about it, I doubt it wouldn’t be true relating to medieval landscape assessment.
    I explain me better:
    it’s possible in medieval assesments to have a small settlement, just a feudal mansion or, more probably, a closter acting as central place of economical, social and cultural power, but slighly lesser extent as really bigger near settlements, which are in some way ruled from this central place, to commerce for example.
    Or also in particular context, as in the highlands, in which the connecting nodes between two “indipendent” region could be lesser sized than the central core of it, also if the latter is lesser interacting with the network.
    The resulting photo could be different instead to have extenced settlement as center we could find as a node a lesser sized “topographic unit”.
    I talk about this doubt, because I have this problem analysing SE anatolia during Armenian Middle Ages and I was contricted to evolve a “feature cluster entity” to play also a huge role in my ABM simulation.

    Comment by sandoz79 — July 2, 2007 @ 5:03 pm

  2. Hmm. I take your point regarding the relationship between site size and site importance. I think however that, inasmuch as the model is a simplification of reality, the assumption would still broadly hold. It might be interesting to run the model with your initial data, and see how the feudal mansions fare under the assumptions of the model. If the model consistently doesn’t predict these sites as important locations, then we will need to rethink the model assumptions. But if it does… Part of the validation process is to to have these sites that we think should be important and seeing whether they do emerge in the model.

    Comment by Shawn — July 8, 2007 @ 2:32 pm

  3. Hi

    I found your site very informative and helpful, thank you.

    Comment by lokimikoj — September 21, 2007 @ 3:25 pm

  4. Glad to oblige.

    Comment by Shawn — September 22, 2007 @ 4:13 pm

  5. Hello Shawn,

    Fascinated by your work with the Itineraries which I came across while searching for the VERA project website just now. I’m also interested in the idea of using the technology developed for simulation (especially AI in games) for investigating past cultures. I was wondering about edge effects on the itineraries model. Presumably some of your agents (in the real world) would have destinations not included on the Itineraries and would wander off the routes rather than continuing and spreading (or not) their item of knowledge which I guess would impact on how quickly the knowlwdege spread. Perhaps include different classes of agents - some programmed to follow the routes (simulating perhaps ‘official’ travel, merchants etc) and others with a more local range of interests.

    Just a thought - happy to discuss if this is of interest!

    Ed

    Comment by Edmund Lee — February 20, 2008 @ 9:01 am

  6. Thanks for the comment!

    Regarding edge effects as you describe them… I’m not sure about that. In the model, the paths that the agents followed - the itineraries - were wider than the size of the agents themselves. If you follow one agent around, it is not uncommon to find them wiggling about in a very limited location, bouncing side to side, and sometimes missing an oncoming agent in the other direction. Very few agents as it happens actually traveled an itinerary all the way along its length (this was not a programmed behaviour, but one that emerged from the model itself). That was how I dealt with the problem of localised/globalised travel in the original article. Also, there was always a good chance that the ‘message’ would not be transmitted.

    I tried to keep things as conceptually simple as possible. Introducing another class of agents I think would soon become problematic, because then I would have to devise rules to cover the behaviour of ‘official travellers’, merchants etc. That is, I think introducing another level of complexity would result in a corresponding difficulty in teasing apart what was going on in the model (and referring it back to antiquity).

    Comment by Shawn — February 20, 2008 @ 11:33 am

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