Thinking about your project
It’s time to start thinking about your programming project! You don’t need to start coding yet, but I want you to think carefully about all the following questions. Even better if you write down your answers (for your own benefit). :)
Who am I going to work with? Or do I prefer to work on my own? Your team can be either 1 person (you work on your own) or 2 persons (you work with 1 friend), not larger.
What phenomenon am I / are we interested in? What would I like to model? What sorts of things about language excite me that could potentially be approached using an ABM?
Once you have a broad answer to the previous question, try to narrow it down. Think about the following:
- Can I make use of code already written during the course (such as variational learning) to answer my question? Can I possibly extend that code, to make it better suited to what I’m interested in modelling?
- If not, then can I still figure out how to implement what I need to implement in Julia code?
- Can I think of specific research questions or predictions? (Example: “Does the rate of language change depend on population size?”)
If you are working as part of a team, get together for a brainstorming!
Finally, move on to thinking about the following specific implementation-level questions:
- What will be the agents in my model?
- What is the environment which the agents will occupy?
- How will the agents interact with each other (e.g. randomly, or in some other way)?
- How will I summarize the results of a simulation?
- How many simulations will I need to run?
- How will I communicate my results to my audience (numbers, plots, perhaps animations)?
For inspiration, read (at least) one paper from the readings/projects folder on ILIAS.