PSC120-L1

📗 -> 03/31/25: PSC120-L1

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Lecture Slide Link

🎤 Vocab

❗ Unit and Larger Context

Small summary

✒️ -> Scratch Notes

Course Intro:

Building models is essential to science, whether models are conceptual, mathematical, computational, or physical

• Building models, for most of you, is something you have never done before
• This course is about building a specific kind of scientific model:
• Agent-base models,
• Building them,
• Analyzing them with computer simulations,
• Interpreting their results and
• Presenting our findings

Agents:

• Behave
• Can interact with each other
• Can interact with their environment
• Could be:
  • people making decisions about who to date or vampire bats deciding whether to share a blood meal with a starving bat
    Environment:
• Introduces conditions
• Defines boundaries
• Specifies competitive or cooperative situations in which agents behave
• Could be:
  • the representation of physical space, or a network)
    Interaction:
• Agents interact with each other and their environment via defined mechanisms, which can be
  • direct (agent-agent) and
  • indirect (agent-environment)

Example of Vampire Bat behavior

They have very interesting social behavior:

• Social Levels of Analysis: Populations, Social groups, social networks, and roost
• Behavior: Food sharing, foraging, reproduction

🧪 -> Refresh the Info

Did you generally find the overall content understandable or compelling or relevant or not, and why, or which aspects of the reading were most novel or challenging for you and which aspects were most familiar or straightforward?)

Did a specific aspect of the reading raise questions for you or relate to other ideas and findings you’ve encountered, or are there other related issues you wish had been covered?)

🔗 -> Links

Resources

• Put useful links here

Connections

• Link all related words