On January 10, 2008 the SimCity source code was released under the free software GPL 3 license under the name Micropolis.
that's where I'd start my research. If I was going to do something ... which I'm not¹.
SimCity, as is, does a good enough job that it is widely used by urban planners, city planners, & etc. as a tool. Idly projecting here but it seems to me a neural network-like construct having lots of nodes - 200 or 300 - running SimCity autonomously tossing in cross-communication plus "macro-economic" influences together comprising a first-hack Fitness Landscape would prove interesting. The easiest way to add complexity to the Fitness Landscape is to build some - say 10 to 20 - analog computers, cross-linkable with A/D and D/A conversion to/from the neural net to simulate continuous data streams which the neural net nodes have to 'chunk' - both for data processing and across time.
As an added benefit, you'd get the first major non-von Neumann computer built in a long, long time. Which, by the way, is something we desperately need as a research tool.
¹ Unless somebody wants to pay me to do it. This gun for hire. I can be had. :-)
The ability to model a local political-economy has been around for a long time: SimCity does as good a job as one can expect given their limitations and methodology,..
There's also two price points for the extractors:
So, how you program/process resource extraction depends on if the Model is what-we-got XOR "The Economy."
There's also two price points for the extractors
An accurate Economic Model would require hardware components that are not generally available. Get around this by having the system internet 'savvy.' Problem: this implies the Model will spend its time running -- let me put it -- "naive" simulations at the expense of more "interesting" ones. For any given value of "naive" and "interesting."
It would also require running and managing a software system beyond the sophistication of the average computer user. There's no getting around this one unless a 'brain damaged' version is released to the general public.
Your concerns regarding patents agree with my own experience. And after you get one, it is only a license to sue. Copyright may be more useful. Putting patentable ideas firmly in the public domain is probably the best approach there. Aside from possible profits I find the whole idea fascinating. I only whish I were better able to contribute on the programming side. But that is a hopeless prospect at this point in my life. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
My informed WAG is a project of this magnitude would require serious funding: at least in the $25 to $50 million range. (Hardware engineering is incredibly expensive.) And with a small chance of re-couping the $ injected. Certainly no private funding would be forthcoming and we're not USDA Stamp-of-Approval Serious People® so government funding is out as well.
It might re-coup the money in spin-offs: games, books, seminars, & etc., but "might" cuts no checks.
Economies are modeled - they have to be modeled in some way, for governance. That is why there are national budgets, and offices of budget and management. Now, these models may be imprecise, contentious or too narrow, but they are used to predict the effect of changes in the rules of different types of transactions of citizens, companies, organizations, government and 'external transactions' (i.e. how these rules might interact with the rules of other budget systems in other nations).
However 'inaccurate' such national budgets may be, it is correct to say that building a parallel one would an expensive project. However, the Dutch government is already considering the use of XBRL to 'code' their national budget in such a way as to allow any citizen to play 'what if' with it. The mandated use of XBRL would also bring transparency to corporate accounting, because the tax authorities could also play 'what if' with those accounts. Stress testing, I suppose you'd call it ;-)
An explanation of XBRL is here. There's an XBRL conference in Paris 23-25 June.
So there may be a 'game' to be played in the future that does not require the building of the model.
TBG's 'game', as I understand it, is not about producing a perfect, but coarse, real 'what if' modeled budget, but a simulation of the budget decision processes so that citizens can better understand the processes and thus vote in a more informed manner. Lemonade Stand 3.0. You can't be me, I'm taken
It employed a Hamming Code to protect against lightning induced drop outs. This involved taking two words a chosen interval apart, adding them into a check-sum and recording that check-sum down stream by the same interval. As a consequence one could punch holes in the tape about the size of a paper punch and not loose any information. The problem was that a tape splice edit produced a giant pop.
I spotted a TRW 16 bit multiply-accumulator that could operate with a 110 nano-second period. Back-of-the-envelope calculations showed that one such device was sufficient to perform more than 32 channels worth of such operations in the 20 micr-second period of one 16 bit sample period. "We" got a contract to develop such an editor from 3M and delivered a working system in about one year.
I hired one hardware and three software engineers on a part time consulting basis. The programmers all worked for a local microprocessor based manufacturer of telephone transmission test equipment. My hardware guy was a MIT EE who worked for aerospace. This was an evenings and week-ends project and all kept their day jobs. This was, IIRCC, 1978, and we paid our consultants $35/hr. It was exhausting for them but they more than doubled their income for that year. Me, not so much. I should have demanded their deal!
We were using Motorola 6800 microprocessors and I had partitioned the system into four separate, interacting processor systems. One system consisted of the edit hardware, which executed digital cross-fades using stored PROM coefficient tables, MSI logic and the TRW chip, another was the tape machine controller, another was a SMPTE time code reader and sync machine that could synchronize two machines for assembly edits and the fourth was the user interface machine.
The actual cost of the whole project was around $500,000, including hardware. 3M eventually supplied us with recorders on which to test our system. I don't know what "we" charged 3M. I was "just" the project manager. I understood the application and conceived the over all approach and then got burned for my efforts. If "we" charged 3M $1,000,000 at that time it would not have been too outrageous.
In today's environment there are probably lots of guys and gals who would be quite happy to make $80,000 for a year's work and who have the knowledge but not the day job. Make that $100,000, including paid medical of the caliber of Kaiser and one would have choices. One or two hardware guys, depending on whether one engineer could adequately handle both the digital hardware and the analog function modules, two or three programmers and overhead and we would be under $2,000,000/year for development of the full blown "professional" system. A secondary focus on a consumer type game could produce revenue within a year or so.
I have always liked blue skys.
As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
You'd need some start up cash - probably $500,000 or so - but you certainly wouldn't need $50m.
Second Life charges outrageous land rents - a lot of people are paying >$200/mth for a not very powerful virtual server.
I don't think cash is the issue. Nor are processor cycles - clouding should give you all the cycles you want. It might not give them instantly, but some lag wouldn't necessarily be a huge problem.
Patents and copyrights are essentially unenforceable against Chinese companies in China.
Before you get a patent in the US the USPTO publishes the patent on the internet for "comments and objections." DeepPockets, Inc. regularly scans the site files objections using their patent staff, and forces the applier into a complex, expensive, legal battle which small companies can't afford. A filed patent that is rejected by the USPTO is automatically in the public domain, meaning DeepPockets, Inc. gets to use it for the cost of keeping their patent staff around, which they have to do anyway.
In short: if you have a good idea, Shut Up.
Chris, can we have the story of that film you made with an LLP, again? Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
Social Investment Business
The "Common Source" approach I advocate is outlined there, and that is to put IP into the hands of a Custodian, and then to encapsulate all the rights of use and usufruct/use value within a Master Partnership agreement or protocol.
The outcome is new form of co-ownership or Common Source property right of indefinite duration. Essentially the entire Creative Commons property relationship is then encapsulated within a Corporate personality.
The result is an enterprise model which is both Open and Closed. It is Closed because only LLP members can use it, and Open because anyone who consents to the agreement may be a member.
It's worth pointing out that if all the stakeholders are members, then limitation of liability is unnecessary. That is why I wax lyrical about the LLP being the first example of an Open Corporate. (Cost)-Free limitation of liability is IMHO a very dubious add-on in terms of the public interest. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
The easiest way to add complexity to the Fitness Landscape is to build some - say 10 to 20 - analog computers, cross-linkable with A/D and D/A conversion to/from the neural net to simulate continuous data streams which the neural net nodes have to 'chunk' - both for data processing and across time.
The ability to model a local political-economy has been around for a long time: SimCity does as good a job as one can expect given their limitations and methodology. And since,On January 10, 2008 the SimCity source code was released under the free software GPL 3 license under the name Micropolis. that's where I'd start my research. If I was going to do something ... which I'm not¹.
How clean is the SimCity codebase?
