Gossip, Sexual Recombination and the El Farol Bar: modelling the emergence of heterogeneity - Bruce Edmonds

3. Extending the El Farol Bar Model with Learning and Communication

The two parts of each model are expressions from a two-typed language specified (by the programmer) at the start*1. A simple but real example is shown in figure 1 below. Translated this example means: that it will say that it will go to El Farol's if the trend predicted over observed number going over the last two weeks is greater than 5/3 (the total population was 5 in this example); but it will only actually go if it said it would go or if barGoer-3 said it will go.

Figure 1: A simple example model

The agent gains utility by going to the El Farol Bar when it is not too crowded. Thus each agent is competitively developing its models of what the other agents are going to do.

The model was implemented in a declarative forward-chaining programming language called SDML [4, 10] which has been written specifically for agent-based modelling in the fields of business, management, organisation theory and economics. SDML is particularly suited to this model because is provides facilities for the easy programming of multi-layered object-orientated structures (so the populations of genes within a population of agents is easy) with several levels of time (in this case weeks and days)*2.

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