On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 12:54 AM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear TOmas,
This is quite important in my opinion with network theory finally including human volition and abandoning reductionism,
I really hope you can look into this for discussion at our blog,
see http://gfbertini.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/wisdom-about-crowds/ ; http://www.economist.com/node/18584096?story_id=18584096&fsrc=rss
Existing models of crowd behaviour do just that. They treat moving masses of humanity as though they were fluids. This works, up to a point. But it often fails to predict the changes that happen as a crowd’s density increases and its movement becomes chaotic. That is why Mehdi Moussaid of Paul Sabatier University, in Toulouse, and his colleagues have made a radical innovation. Instead of treating the individual human beings in a crowd as if they were molecules, they have treated them as if they were human beings. They have, in other words, given them volition. Of course, the objective of someone in a moving crowd is usually fairly simple—to get somewhere and then stay there. But it is an objective, nevertheless.
Unless I am really missing something, this is absolutely not anything new in the world of network sciences and complex systems science/modeling/theory. In fact, practically every agent based complex systems model applies simple rules to the agents and then runs the model to see what will happen. This goes all the way back to John Holland, Robert Axelrod, and others who pioneered complex systems models. Read the article on The Economist itself to see why I am having this reaction: http://www.economist.com/node/18584096?story_id=18584096&fsrc=rss
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