I’m checking out NetLogo, from Northwestern university.
It’s free software that allows you to do simple programming that can result in startlingly complex visual models. The creators call it “a cross-platform multi-agent programmable modeling environment.”
It somewhat reminds me of the The Game of Life, which you can play in Mathematica from Wolfram Software. That’s a cellular automaton game, but NetLogo, while rules-based seems capable of much more complexity.
A fairly simple example is Follower, in which turtles must follow other turtles. There are only 4 possible states in this example:
– Unattached
– Following another turtle (a “tail”)
– Being followed by another turtle (a “head”)
– Following and being followed by other turtles (a “body” segment)
A more complex example is Mimicry, an evolution model in which butterflies are eaten by birds preferentially based on color – a signal for good or bad food – and reproduce differentially based on population size, mutation, and other factors.
Very interesting!
