
Athena regional stability simulator: model political, economic, military actors - blacksqr
https://github.com/AthenaModel/athena
======
dsjoerg
"Validation of the entire model is not feasible in the near future. The
phenomena modeled are too poorly understood and too strongly interconnected.
Even with the modest goal of merely “anticipating likely consequences”, the
best that can be hoped for is establishment of credibility." \-- from pg 16 of
[https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201400...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140000673.pdf)

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hbosch
Finally, the first step to an actually playable game of Eschaton _.

_ [http://www.outsideonline.com/1902196/eschaton-worlds-most-
co...](http://www.outsideonline.com/1902196/eschaton-worlds-most-complicated-
game)

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sideshowb
So tell us, ...is Brexit a Seldon crisis?

~~~
viraptor
Or the solution to an incoming Seldon crisis in the EU...

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pm90
I was hoping there would be some examples showing how to use this in the
README :(

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falsedan
The single open issue (a tortuously-phrased "write some docs") should make
clear the amount of effort the authors have made & willingness to make this
approachable to newcomers (zero).

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matt4077
The code is pretty readable. And there's a freaking 250-page User’s Guide
linked from the documentation. I really think they deserve a little more than
some snarky dismissal. There aren't very many open source projects with that
level of documentation.

It's not Sim City, but then again maybe they didn't set out to create
something that provides insights to people who first came across their field
of study five minutes earlier.

~~~
falsedan
Are you referring to the 250 pages of reference docs? I didn't see a 'Getting
Started' or 'Examples' or 'Guide' or 'Tutorial' section, and I stand by my
assessment of their attitude to newcomers.

> _maybe they didn 't set out to create something that provides insights to
> people who first came across their field of study five minutes earlier_

I wish people would stop submitting those kinds of links to HN. Also: I have
an axe to grind (about terrible unapproachable documentation, academic or
corporate or hobbyist).

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nl
_I wish people would stop submitting those kinds of links to HN._

Why would you want that?

Surely the point of HN is to read about things on the bleeding edge of what is
possible. Sometimes that blood comes from being too ambitious and sometimes
from missing docs. Either way, it seems a small price to pay.

~~~
sgt101
I agree - it's brilliant to find out about real progress that hasn't been
picked up in the mainstream, possibly because it's hard to consume.

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powera
Does anybody use this?

I certainly hope not. Most of the research papers have been related to
refactoring TCL code, rather than on any correspondence between the models and
reality.

You don't need a computer model to tell you that people don't like when you
bomb their neighborhoods, kill their friends, and threaten their access to
food and water. You _definitely_ don't need a model to suggest that maybe if
there are also some riots, people will like the outcome.

~~~
matt4077
I don't quite understand the criticism... Yes, this is not (yet) a model that
predicts the future. But when has "we're not there yet" ever been a good
reason to stop?

Societies are comparable to the weather, in that they are dynamic systems
highly susceptible to instability when simulated (-> chaos theory). That's why
it took from the 60s until the mid-90s before weather prognosis consistently
started to beat "it's going to be like today".

Societies are even more difficult, because the individual units of simulation
are already quite chaotic: while the result of increased pressure on a fixed
amount of air has been measured to whatever precision you could want, and has
always followed a rather simple formula, doing the same with human behaviour
is still far in the future.

But that doesn't mean such models are useless. Just think of the fight over
the results of raising the minimum wage. Some people should initially lose
their job. Others have more money. How are they spending that money? Does that
spending create jobs? What's the effect on inflation? etc...

Having an agent-based model forces you to describe every assumption you're
making, free of ambiguity. Maybe if we ask economists to build something like
that, they'll at least grow an appreciation for what they don't yet know.

~~~
powera
Certain models are inherently useless.

If you use a Taylor series to model a sine curve, you can get arbitrarily good
results over an arbitrarily large range, yet the model will always fail
catastrophically when the modeler wants to figure out the value that will give
sin(x) = 2.

This seems like a system designed for the analyst who wants to make sin(x) =
2, and will blame the participants when reality doesn't match the model.

