Hot Spots & Complex System – Update 2

I’ve fallen behind about 2 weeks on where I wanted to be at this point in my work. At this point I would have wanted to have a few ideas and a solid understanding as to where I’m heading but without a goal it’s hard to gauge how well I’m doing. Yes there’s doubt each step of the way.

Current Accomplishments
I read through the paper, Modeling civil violence: An agent-based computational approach, which the Net-Logo Model, Rebellion, is based on once again to understand what this is all about.

The paper in a nutshell
The paper outlines 2 scenarios. The first, models a world where a central government attempts to control its population with different tools, cops and government legitimacy. The second model (which I find interesting) models a world where a central government has no acting force and the conflict is between 2 groups within its borders.

I find this second model interesting because given a small L (legitimacy for the other group to live) genocide occurs in all instances. Even when introducing peacekeepers the outcome is genocide most of the time. Interesting.

Reaction to reading
My reaction was more to the author introducing an extra variable into the complex system, the peacekeeper. How one small variable gleaned a very interesting picture of the world. Though a, “no duh Sherlock. Of course thats going to happen”, entered into my head this as a good variable to introduce.

This lead me to think…”im thinking too hard here. Lets keep this simple”. I went back to my note and looked at a single item in the paper which had me thinking. The author mentions there are a few agents which hold a private grudge yet never revolt. I wanted to see this in action and decided to update the code to see these agents.

Since each agent has a perceived-grievance variable which can be 0-100, where the higher value depicts a high change of revolting if the probability of said agent wont get taken to jail I set all agents with perceived-grievance > 50 to pink. (Screen shot to come)

A few questions