Agent Based Modeling Quotes

“One of the most complex computer games ever devised is called Dwarf Fortress. It is not much to look at: its graphics are the terminal-based structures that were in vogue in the 1980s. What makes Dwarf Fortress an extraordinary game is the depth of agent-based logic: every character, every enemy unit, even pets are endowed with a hugely complex agent-based behavioural model. As an example, cats in Dwarf Fortress can stray into puddles of spilled beer, lick their paws later, and succumb to alcohol poisoning.

Yet agent-based modeling is about much more than belligerent dwarves and drunk cats. Agent-based models are powerful computational tools to simulate large populations of boundedly rational actors who act according to preset preferences, although often enough in a stochastic manner.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python

“In principle, agent-based modelling should make some of the grandest social and political questions of our time accessible to rational experiment, such as whether the globalization of the economy is likely to lead to greater cultural harmony or to cultural conflict. But some social scientists remain uneasy, suspecting that any particular agent-based model of a social phenomenon risks coming to conclusions that depend on the underlying assumptions of the model. How do we know whether any one set of rules or assumptions will lead to truly representative behaviour, and not to an excessively crude caricature of the real situation? In short, such models can hardly be expected to provide a sound basis for policy until we can distinguish what is contingent from what is robust: what a particular model will produce as opposed to what all good models will produce.”
― Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another