Story time: Dr Epstein and Dr. Axtell’s book Growing Artificial Societies cover art features the 1942 Broadway Boogie Woogie by Dutch-born artist Piet Mondrian.
MoMA’s Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Ann Temkin describes the artwork as “…the horizontal and vertical lines of the painting are actually composed of rectangles and squares of red, blue, yellow, and white and gray. And they’re navigating you across the canvas much like streets would in a cityscape, or much like dancers would across a dance floor.” And I would like to add – an Agent-based model of a cellular automata of Broadway frequent visitors. Much like – “…the title of the painting, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, is a nice collision of two delighted references to things that made Mondrian so enthusiastic about his new life in New York City: Broadway, a very busy, broad thoroughfare full of interesting stores, but also full of theaters representing the novelty and the liveliness of the American musical tradition, and boogie-woogie, the jazz music that Mondrian discovered here and loved so much.” this one image encapsulates all that I adore with every fibre of my being – Broadway, Digital Humanities, Computational Social Sciences, George Mason, and such.
I read / listened to Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman in tangent with the course so as to immerse myself in this world of Behavioral Economics. Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Amos Tversky are the OG scholarly behavioral psychology best friends. They seem to be of a more atypical kind of Economists, who seem to have stumbled into the field, and in Dr. Kahneman’s case, into a Nobel Prize for Economics (or, well, The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which is not exactly the same, as I hear it.)
My point is, there are a range of readings that are helpful in the field, but this one helped me with understanding this game theory concept, my other courses on cognitive sciences aiding in visualization, and the Zero-Intelligence Trader model. Early in the semester (before my classes became completely online and I became utterly inconsolably desolate about it.) I participated in The Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science’s experimental economics study, which further replicated this simulation in a real-people study setting.
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