Course I400/I590

I400/590: Topics in Informatics - Games and Gossip (3CR)

Spring Semester 2005

Associate Instructor: Lalitha Viswanath

Description: Techniques and tools to understand and simulate social phenomena like cooperation, gossip, segregation, urban sprawl, fashion and traffic jams. Computational worlds provide insight in emergent phenomena in the real world. As a project students will build an artificial world in which their social agents eat, work, cooperate, have conflicts, gossip and have sex.

Topics include:

- emergence, micro motives and macro behavior, and complex adaptive systems
- cellular automata, game of life
- agent-based models
- diffusion processes, tipping points, fads and fashion
- social dilemmas, cooperation
- foraging, competition, artificial social societies
We will use Netlogo for implementing a number of simulation models.

In the second half of the course the participants will work on a project in groups of about 4 participants.

Prerequisites: Ideally some hands-on programming. Minimally I210 or equivalents.

Lecture: Monday/Wednesday, 9:30-10:15AM in Informatics room 107

Lab: Tuesday, 11.15AM-12.05PM (room 109). This is voluntary lab time starting at February 1.

Office hours Marco Janssen: Thursday, 9.00AM-Noon. Annex of Mathers (408 North Indiana Avenue) Room 227.

Office hours Lalitha Viswanath: Monday, 10.15AM -1PM, Informatics 313

Course Policy

Schedule

Reading Material

Axelrod, R. (1984) Evolution of Cooperation, New York: Basic Books (required reading)

Epstein, J.M. and R. Axtell (1996). Growing Artificial Societies (required reading)

Schelling, T. (1978). Micromotives and macrobehavior. New York: W. W. Norton

Links