The focus of our first technical report was a technology agnostic description of our framework for simulating and studying resource use. Implementing and testing out a non-digital version of this framework made two things clear: (1) it was possible to do, thus confirming the technology agnostic aspect of the framework, and (2) it was painfully slow (as expected), which means digital implementations are pragmatically required for the framework be truly usable in research.
This led to some Ken and I have some useful follow up discussions about how to implement time, space and other physical elements in simulation environments in a way that is realistic enough for the the results of the simulation to be transferable to real world situations. This is particularly challenging in simulations where both humans and agents are using the simulation at the same time.
Coming out of these discussions, we’ve written an addendum to our technical report (which we may at some point publish in some form as a stand alone technical report). From the introduction:
This document provides considerations to be taken into account when digitally implementing physical elements of The Island Game – time, space and related elements like energy, matter and action. These considerations are particularly important when the implementation is being created in order to validly model human and other agent resource use behaviours and by extension support the generation of useful hypotheses about these behaviours.