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A special course on Agent-based and Computer Intensive Modeling is being offered this summer at the ICPSR summer institute at the University of Michigan. The course, held from July 24-August 18, will be taught by Ken Kollman, Scott Page, and Rick Riolo. This is the second year the course has been offered, and it includes lectures plus opportunities to receive instruction in the computer lab on using or developing computational models.
Here is a description of the course from the catalog:
The nonlinear dynamics exhibited by complex systems often pose difficult problems for modelers of those systems. The problems are especially challenging when the complex systems are adaptive. The growing availability of computers has led to a recent proliferation of "bottom-up, agent-based" models of complex adaptive systems. These models consist of a number of interacting agents. Each agent's behavior is governed by a small set of simple rules. However, the interaction of the agents can produce complex "emergent" structures and dynamic behaviors of individuals and groups. These lectures will give an introduction to bottom-up approaches to computer modeling, comparing them to more traditional mathematical (analytical) approaches and to top-down computer models (e.g., typical macro-economic models), and offer a survey of the field of Evolutionary Computation (EC), including a discussion of the role of EC in agent-based models. In addition to the methods and techniques of these models, a number of social science applications will be reviewed and analyzed.
More information about the course and about applying to the summer
institute can be found at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu
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