OPTIMAES (Deprecated - go here)

2008-08-05T22:17:00.000-07:00

Hey!! I just noticed that after at least 8 months, blogger has finally re-enabled this blog.

Well, too late! The official OPTIMAES blog is now on Ning where it's also a community.

However .... keep an eye here ... just in case anything turns up

2007-12-28T05:49:00.000-08:00

BBC illustrates the US mortgage bond collapse.

And here's more explanation.

World looks likely to head for major crisis. Now how might OPTIMAES model / explain this kind of thing?

2007-12-18T23:31:00.001-08:00

Cool alt.coin-collectors

2007-08-28T15:34:00.000-07:00

Darius just pointed me to what looks like a good book.

2007-08-17T15:06:00.000-07:00

Interesting question about a need to regulate banks in virtual worlds.

2007-03-11T22:50:00.000-07:00

Cool! Many Eyes is an online data visualization service where you can upload and share your own data-sets.

Perfect for amateur research mobs.

2007-03-07T22:11:00.000-08:00

Gambit is a library of game theory software and tools for the construction and analysis of finite extensive and strategic games ...

Scriptable in Python.

2007-02-21T13:25:00.000-08:00

I hadn't noticed before, but The Transitioner now has an awesome list of alt.money software projects.

2007-02-21T12:27:00.000-08:00

As usual, I'm in two minds about the future of the OPTIMAES code-base.

The original code was written in Python. Recent experiments have been done with Repast.Py.

There's no doubt that Repast.py lets new users get going very quickly. It has a GUI, which lets you set up a simulation in a few minutes. And you get graphing and neat grid and network diagrams free. As one of the objectives of OPTIMAES is educational and particularly learning-by-exploring toy economic worlds, Repast.py fits well. It's a good educational tool.

On the other hand, it's not really Python, so you can't use the full expressivity of the language to define complex models, nor can you integrate with other Python libraries. There are more powerful simulation and graphing libraries available which would be nice to use. But, these aren't currently integrated into a package comparable with RepastPy.

At present I'm thinking of following the following strategy : the next few experiments will be done in Repast. However the original code-base will still be available to those who are interested. The Repast pseudo-python will be easy enough to adapt for use by anyone who'd like to work with this code-base.

Welcome to OPTIMAES

2007-02-21T11:41:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the new home on the internet of OPTIMAES. You may have encountered us on the web before (on our wiki or elsewhere.) However, from now on, this is going to be the main point of contact. The wiki succumbed to spam-bots and, frankly, blogs are often more compelling as ways of creating a channel of conversation than wikis.

If you've never heard of it before : OPTIMAES stands for "Open Project to Investigate Money and Economic Systems". It's collaborative research project for people around the world to think about what money is and how it works. In particular :

we favour "amateur" involvement : the founders are not trained or professional economists (although we have some friends who are) and we want to encourage other non-professionals to start thinking about these questions too.
our method is informed by computer simulation. We start with agent-based computer models that are simple enough that you can run them on your own PC and can learn to perform your own experiments.

The original OPTIMAES code was written in Python. More recently we've decided to play with Repast.py a Python-like scripting language on top of the Java-based Repast agent modeling environment.

All OPTIMAES code is moving to a new home which will be linked here once it's online.