The booksellers, in turn, sell their products to readers. Printers print books and keep their products until shippers arrive, who deliver the books to booksellers. 3 In the model authors try to publish their books, publishers accept manuscripts and bring the manuscripts to printers. His model includes, following the studies of the cultural historian Robert Darnton about the 18th century book trade, authors, publishers, printers, shippers, booksellers, and readers. Jeremy Throne, for example, developed an agent-based model about the book trade and the communication circle that connects the different entities of the book trade. Some cases in this regard are concerned with the history of book publishing, social research networks or the evolution of social norms. This makes it easy to create a set of heterogeneous agents, as can be seen in the El Farol Bar model I am going to introduce further down below.Īlthough Netlogo has been mainly used by disciplines like sociology, ecology, archeology, and economics, there also have been attempts by humanities scholars to use the programming language to explore their research questions. In a similar way agents (in the Netlogo lingo called turtles) too can be assigned variables representing their properties. The background, for example, over which agents move, is divided into individual patches, which can be assigned variables representing real world properties like elevation or other geographical features. The Netlogo programming environment therefore includes functions and capabilities to support this requirement. In an ant colony those entities would be ants, in a cloud of gas molecules, and in a trade network individual traders. Netlogo is built around the idea that in certain cases, to understand a natural or social phenomenon, it is advantageous to explicitly simulate the behavior of the individual entities constituting the phenomenon. 1 Because the program has a low difficulty threshold for newcomers and high versatility ceiling for experienced programmers, it can be used for a wide range of different applications, covering everything from initial explorations to sophisticated programs. Netlogo allows the user to create computer simulations in a comparatively short amount of time. In the second part I will present Brian Arthur’s El Farol Bar model, to illustrate how agent-based models differ from more traditional modelling techniques. This is not intended to be an extensive tutorial but rather a first glimpse into some of the basic features of the programming language. The first part will consist of a very brief introduction to some elements of the Netlogo environment. In this blog post I am going to give an overview of Netlogo, an agent-based modeling environment.
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