NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
ccl.northwestern.edu
NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
#2What other languages provide this kind of model output? It's very interesting.
Re: NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
#3What other languages provide this kind of model output? It's very interesting.
I have used Mesa (python 3) in one of my master's classes. https://github.com/projectmesa/mesa
Re: NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
#4What other languages provide this kind of model output? It's very interesting.
There's a similar language called StarLogo (http://www.slnova.org/), but the latest iteration (StarLogo TNG https://education.mit.edu/portfolio_page/starlogo-tng/) is focused on education and accessibility, and is a graphical block style language. There's a JavaScript framework based on NetLogo called AgentScript (http://agentscript.org/). I've also seen people use Processing (https://processing.org/) for agent-based modeling.
StarLogo and NetLogo were some of my first languages. Modeling real-world systems is an immensely powerful educational tool. It helps contextualize programming in a relatable way, and it helps you to learn about complexity and the way the world works at the same time.
Re: NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
#5Oh, well beyond "very interesting". This type of modeling can yield results that are otherwise intractable. It is one of the primary reasons Thomas Schelling received a Nobel prize in economics. It should be in the toolkit of every applied mathematician or computer scientist.
Re: NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
#6> NetLogo is a multi-agent programmable modeling environment.
What does that even mean? That description fits nearly every commonly used programming language and runtime.
Re: NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
#7Oh, well beyond "very interesting". This type of modeling can yield results that are otherwise intractable. It is one of the primary reasons Thomas Schelling received a Nobel prize in economics. It should be in the toolkit of every applied mathematician or computer scientist.
I liked the tutorial #1, linked from here:
https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/
Is this only available for use within the GUI?
I can imagine how mathematicians would use it but what would be typical applications of a computer scientist?
Re: NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
#8Oh, well beyond "very interesting". This type of modeling can yield results that are otherwise intractable. It is one of the primary reasons Thomas Schelling received a Nobel prize in economics. It should be in the toolkit of every applied mathematician or computer scientist.
I liked the tutorial #1, linked from here: https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/ Is this only available for use within the GUI? I can imagine how mathematicians would use it but what would be typical applications of a computer scientist?
Agent script looks like an amazing port:
Not in love with coffee script anymore but oh well.
The demos are great:
Re: NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
#9> NetLogo is a multi-agent programmable modeling environment. What does that even mean? That description fits nearly every commonly used programming language and runtime.
It's about the environment. Everything in NetLogo could be done in straight assembly, that doesn't mean it's accessible to a wider audience. A large chunk of the motivation for NetLogo is pedagogical: make simulations and modeling accessible to students so they can explore (dynamically, not just statically) different concepts.
Re: NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment
#10What other languages provide this kind of model output? It's very interesting.
There are more and more these days. If you want Java/scala-based, the two biggest ones are:
- MASON: https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/
- Repast: https://repast.github.io/index.html
For Python, someone else has already mentioned Mesa: https://github.com/projectmesa/mesa/
You can find some more lists at https://www.comses.net/ -- sadly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_agent-based_mode... looks fairly sparse / a little outdated (though I have only passing familiarity with most of those).
Finally, I think a great technical source of theory about these models comes from Cosma Shalizi's notebook on ABM: http://bactra.org/notebooks/agent-based-modeling.html He's one of the single best sources I've seen for describing systems for formally estimating ABMs.
Netlogo is great for fast prototyping, but at least as of ...well a number of years ago now, there was a noticeable lack of scientific computing libraries. For example numerical optimization routines were extremely basic. I had to use a user-contributed package to solve a root finding problem.
Honestly for this type of work I typically write my own from scratch in Python. Here's a great set of lectures and code from Blake LeBaron, "from sratch" in Python, for finance ABMs: http://people.brandeis.edu/~blebaron/classes/agentfin/ ...and here's a nice from scratch Schelling model in Python: https://lectures.quantecon.org/py/schelling.html