Interesting
model of how recommendation systems reduce diversity and choice in a market.
Continue
Added by phil jones on March 27, 2009 at 11:13am —
No Comments
Here's a bad example for an alt.currency : being backed by the same financial system which is currently crashing around us.
Continue
Added by phil jones on March 12, 2009 at 3:38pm —
1 Comment
A new local currency for Barkshire :
Barkshares.
Continue
Added by phil jones on March 7, 2009 at 3:32pm —
No Comments
Hi to Dante who's just joined us. And thanks for adding us to the P2P Foundation's Complementary Currency Software wiki page :
http://p2pfoundation.net/Complementary_Currency_Software Continue
Added by phil jones on December 3, 2008 at 7:29pm —
No Comments
Added by phil jones on November 22, 2008 at 11:10am —
No Comments
Hi to the people who just joined. If you didn't notice the link, the OPTIMAES codebase is hosted on
here on Google Code.
It's in Python, and is a more or less complete rewrite. Currently we have selfish foragers, barter agents and gift-givers. I'm working on a new money-using agent, but haven't yet decided the right algorithm. All suggestions are welcome.
Continue
Added by phil jones on November 20, 2008 at 11:18pm —
No Comments
Haven't linked the
Lewis Pound yet. Seems to be the hot alt.money in the UK. And it's just round the corner from my old stomping ground in Brighton.
Continue
Added by phil jones on October 20, 2008 at 6:38pm —
1 Comment
Content Management system has a
built-in module for them.
(hat-tip rup3rt)
Continue
Added by phil jones on August 14, 2008 at 3:00am —
No Comments
A fascinating discussion over that P2P Foundation :
What Kind of Open Money Do We Need? Continue
Added by phil jones on August 6, 2008 at 3:00am —
No Comments
I'm not going. But the World Congress on Social Simulation this July
looks cool. Continue
Added by phil jones on June 25, 2008 at 11:23am —
No Comments
At the end of 2006, I taught a brief extension course at the University of Brasilia, introducing the idea of computer simulations in the social sciences. For this I used
RepastPy (a Python-like variant of RePast)
RePast has some nice, GUI and dynamic chart generating capabilities. And useful examples such as
Schelling's model of emergent racial segrega…
Continue
Added by phil jones on June 19, 2008 at 5:00am —
No Comments
Previously, the OPTIMAES experiment was being run, starting with 100 agents, on a grid. The grid constrains the agents so that each has only four neighbours with which they can interact. This gives relatively few opportunities for bartering or gifting. So few that bartering appeared to produce an effect that was little different from selfish isolation.
Did this mean that barter was wholly useless? Or that there was simply a bug?
To look more closely, the results of all three strategies (selfis…
Continue
Added by phil jones on June 15, 2008 at 11:00pm —
2 Comments
Zby asks : why OPTIMAES assumes homogeneous societies where all agents play the same strategy, rather than mixed societies where different agents play different strategies. (And would seem to be more realistic.)
Answer :
The main reason for this at the moment is that it's hard to see how different agent strategies would interact. Any kind of transaction is a property of a dyad (pair) that needs both to play their appropriate parts.
What would happen if a Gifting agent met a Barter agent? They…
Continue
Added by phil jones on June 11, 2008 at 11:50am —
No Comments
I added the "barter" agent to the preceding experiment.
Barter agents use a very naive bartering algorithm whereby agents attempt to swap what they need for what they have a surplus of ... with neighbours who have opposite requirements. (See code
here.)
The result :
And you can see that bartering en…
Continue
Added by phil jones on June 10, 2008 at 5:30am —
No Comments
I got curious looking at the last results ... does the population decline continue or does it bottom out?
Intuitively you'd think that it will bottom out somewhere because there is a sub-population who are self-sufficient (ie. for all resources, they can get more than they consume).
Does the gift economy eventually decay to the same level or can it sustain itself somewhere above that?
Here's the same experiment run for 1000 time-steps. (As before you're seeing an aggregate of 10 runs of a pop…
Continue
Added by phil jones on June 10, 2008 at 5:00am —
No Comments
OK,
so the new code is at
Google Code. You can check it out of the Subversion repository.
It's still embrionic but you can do the experiments which produced today's graph ... files beginning with "ex" are main experiment files, performing several runs of a single economy type. Have a look at one to see what fires the whole thing off.
In next couple of days I hope I'll finish porting the old Barter and Money agents to this new framework and they…
Continue
Added by phil jones on June 9, 2008 at 5:21am —
No Comments
Here's the
original OPTIMAES announcement on Kuro5hin back in 2003!!
(Gulp! Really *was* five years ago!)
I think this is a pretty good introduction to the project and the motivations behind it.
Continue
Added by phil jones on June 9, 2008 at 4:55am —
No Comments
I just couldn't resist posting this tonight :
I'm refactoring / rewriting the original OPTIMAES python code-base. When I first wrote it, about 4 or 5(!) years ago, I was just coming out of Java and I wrote in a very inefficient, Java-like way. I've changed my coding style considerably since then, and frankly I was appalled at the original code when I came back to it.
I'm reinventing it in my…
Continue
Added by phil jones on June 9, 2008 at 3:30am —
No Comments
OK,
http://optimaes.net and http://optimaes.info now point here to the Ning community.
Continue
Added by phil jones on June 7, 2008 at 6:55pm —
No Comments
Good.
RSS feeds seem to be working and going into FriendFeed and LifeStreamFM readers. For viewers who've come from there, welcome to OPTIMAES.
Continue
Added by phil jones on June 7, 2008 at 6:45pm —
No Comments
