Come Play With Us!

Using some of the funds we've already raised, our research community has just launched an open-access cloud modeling environment which will allow us to collaboratively program simulations related to the development of Complex Thermostatistics. It is free to use for any researchers who believe a generalized Thermostatistics can successfully describe the behavior of complex systems!

By contributing toward our reach goal, you are guaranteeing that this aspect of our community infrastructure will remain operational at no charge to researchers for at least a year.

For its launch, I've included a simulation that is making waves in a very young scientific discipline called Complexity Economics. This model, called the Sugarscape model, explores the socio-economic properties of a community of artificially-intelligent agents living inside a computer simulation. You can use a Sugarscape model to grow a very simple, complex "economy" from scratch. The Sugarscape model was championed by reseachers Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell when they applied the framework for John Conway's Game of Life to ideas from an earlier paper from 1969.

Traditional microeconomic models typically start out with assumptions that there are consumers, producers, technologies, and markets. Traditional macroeconomic models likewise assume the existence of money, labor markets, capital markets, government, and central banks. Epstein and Axtell wanted none of that. They wanted to figure out the minimum conditions required to set off a chain reaction of economic activity, and their result was the following:

• There exists an environment with:
  • a notion of physical space (a simple two-dimensional grid)
  • energy in the system (piles of sugar on the grid intersections)
  • differences in energy amounts throughout physical space (piles vary in amount of sugar)
• There exist agents with:
  • the ability to take in information from the environment, and to process it (vision, decision-making)
  • actions (move toward sugar piles)
  • cost structure (metabolism for digesting sugar)

With these conditions set, turns are taken where each agent looks ahead as far as their vision allows, determines the unoccupied space within their field of vision with the most sugar, moves to that space, and collects the sugar. Even with these very simple rules, you get interesting results such as the evolution of wealth distribution toward a power law.

Mathematical frameworks such as the Sugarscape model, when correctly applied, hope to answer questions such as: "How do the behaviors, relationships, institutions, and ideas that underpin our economy form, and how do they evolve over time?"

To play around with this model directly, join us in our cloud modeling environment and run the 'original_sugarscape.py' python file located in the 'src' folder. Let us know what you discover here!

Love, Shaun

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Reference:

•  The Origin of Wealth