All,
For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting
discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models. Are
there only a few basic types? Are many apparently different agent based
models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle
variations?
Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They argued that any such
classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the
narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me argued that there MUST (note the
use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms. In ABM's, there must be
"natural kinds". You should know that Me has never written a program longer
than a seven line Word macro.
Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by his
experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important.
Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But for
evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic
classifications, the historical record of evolution. If we took this analogy
seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of ABM's on the
history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on the code fragments
that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless endeavor. But if history
is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary
case.
But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a dark art of classification
that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst species
without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution. Yet, as I
understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics of
abm's look like? And should we care about it?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu)============================================================
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