Lab 6 continued

Once you spend some time brainstorming, it is important to begin the second step of model-building:

2. Focusing Your Ideas to Theory

Next explore the theories underlying what you intend to model. If you are trying to model ants foraging, what theories exist to explain how ants forage?

What is the kernel or core idea that you can derive from the theory?

Don’t give short-thrift to theory, and recognize that this can be a time-consuming process. 

Most models should attempt to reflect existing theories. If your model doesn’t have any theory behind it, then it will have little value to others.

3. Hypothesis Building 

• Who are your agents?
• What characteristics or variables do they have
• What is the environment?
• What does the “world” look like?
• What are the rules of interaction?
   

4. Flow Chart

While not al programmers do this, we believe that you create a flow-chart of the logic of the model before starting to write code. The goal here is to write out, perhaps in a drawing, what you think the model will look like.   We often use graphical tools like Microsoft Visio to assist in this process, but a pen and paper is more than adequate.

The flow-chart becomes a guide for the code-writing to come; it can provide as much or as little detail as you want, but it should have enough detail to describe what you think the model is going to look like. (The actual model might change as you work through the process of coding, but this is ok!).

Here is an example of a flow-chart that we created to capture an existing model. (We’ll use a different example below as we work through an actual model example.

Continue this study guide.