A bit of vocabulary, and what I'll be doing:
I will use the term 'simulator' to describe the piece of software that
is to be written, and 'simulation' or the phrases 'simulation
exercise' or 'running simulation' to describe the activity of using
the simulator to simulate something.
The foremost of my self-assigned tasks is to create a simulator, with
appropriate documentation, that I hope will be capable of simulating
the world economy. That does not mean it can only be used to simulate
the economy of the whole world, and indeed I hope it will be used for
simulating smaller units.
If Ed Weick is right it may not make much sense to model the whole
world, but the simulator created with that in mind could certainly be
used to model any domestic economy. Whether or not Ed is right about
this should be something the simulations can answer.
To run a simulation you need more than the simulator, you need a
collection of data in a particular format, which I will call a
'dataset'. I have also assigned myself the task of collected and
formatting a dataset for use in simulating the world economy. I do
not have the expertise or the manpower to do this properly, so what I
produce should be called a 'demonstration dataset' and I intend to use
it in convincing people to work on this project and supply better
data.
It is my intention to do the systems engineering for this project
properly, but as well as all the documentation that implies I want to
produce a prototype or proof of concept. The prototype will lack many
of the capabilities I've written about, but it should be capable of
loading the demonstration dataset and running some kind of simulation
with it.
After I have produced requirements and design documentation and a
crude working prototype the task of properly implementing the
simulator can begin, and for that I'd like to get some help. In the
meanwhile I'm comfortable working alone, though I'd certainly not turn
down help if someone is anxious to provide it.
dpw
Douglas P. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/index.html
