What are /r/Simulate's favorite Products & Services?

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You're absolutely right. I met up with a guy at lunch who contacted me over the weekend. (turned out we both work at big data + marketing firms in Seattle that are only a block apart).

We had some big discussions about how something like this might function. The biggest design feature of the simulation will be the ability to seamlessly convert between agent based behavior and equation derived abstractions. I definitely need to illustrate this heavily and provide a host of examples. That will be my goal for the next week.

I was thinking though... Maybe we have a contest or micro-project kick off to have people come up with different methods of using automata in this way.

We should have mini-sims that only model a tinyish part of the whole project as a sort of test for the central project.

Like these spore games. http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes

Maybe a model for simulating the spread of humans on random maps (or just start with earth). No language culture or anything tied to it.

http://bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

The "world" doesn't need to have any more than a dozen terrain types just as pixels on a flat image.

Or any other similar small projects to ramp up on how automata might work in the bigger setting.

While these mini-projects are going on, me and anyone else interested can help draft a deeper system design.

There are lots of freely available technical tutorials on how to use NetLogo (for example), but it sounds like you're more interested in something on the process of developing and using ABM (scientifically)? If so, i'm not aware of any free books on that side of things (the Grimm and Railsback book is the most widely used and accessible for that, using NetLogo). I'd be interested if others know any free books of this type.

Hi! We're a nonprofit research institute that uses simulation methods, including ABM, to study the dynamics of social systems, predict human behavior, and craft policy interventions. We published a book in 2019 called Human Simulation that describes applications of modeling & simulation for humanities scholars.

Here's a sample model from NetLogo that might be useful in learning how ABM works, especially its impact on social sciences.

Thanks. I just found out that the creators of "Spore" have posted a lot of their initial prototypes on their website. You can find them here:
http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes

Agent Based Modelling is always something I've wanted to learn. I have these (old) books in my wishlist that probably serve as a very gentle introductions.

Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo