Because of the success of the meeting yesterday, I took it easy last night. I came home after work and fired up the Orange cab (2×12) through the Digitech 2120 and used a clean signal with digital delay and high gain. I played random things for about two hours and found some nice grooves to stick with. I had a couple beers along the way and enjoyed the time alone. As if on queue, a friend and professional guitarist called as I was wrapping up and we chatted– mostly about 80’s metal residue around the world– while he drove to give a guitar lesson.

Everything in my mind is agents and modeling. I’m deep inside of simulation mode and it’s creating an interesting layer between me and everything I see and think about. We’ve now modeled flocking birds. Next we modeled flocking birds with one predator bird chasing them. You can see that here.

Just click “setup” once, and then click “go”. You can adjust the parameters with the sliders. First just watch it run for a while, and then I recommend sliding the “adversary speed” up and watching how the flocks react. (The adversary is the red bird, modeled to be a bird of prey.)  It’s eerily accurate if you watch the flock form, and unsurprisingly (because of how agent models work), the code is not very complicated. Each agent– in this case birds– is governed by a few simple rules. Put them all together and interesting things happen. And this is how nature works, by and large.

Next I want to model belief systems by using social network theory and multi-agent models. That will be pretty big and I’m starting that in about a week with a professor of religion. This could be my next big contribution and I’m fairly psyched to start writing this up.

Tuesday is already half way over and it’s time to train. Let’s go.