A Real-Time Simulation of Social Distancing at the Beach

Here’s a great example of “today’s rabbit hole is tomorrow’s feature.” Six or seven years ago, I was chatting with a social psychologist who mentioned a program called NetLogo that researchers use to simulate group behavior. I downloaded it mainly out of nostalgia for the original Logo.

This led me to many engrossing hours playing around with what’s called “agent-based modeling,” an incredibly fun mode of programming where you create a population of individuals–peoples, turtles, people and turtles together–and assign them simple rules of how to interact. When all the little agents interact, even the simplest rules can lead to astounding complexity.

At the time, I couldn’t think of any application to the news and moved on. But I keep a list of these diversions for things like pandemics, when crowd behavior is suddenly very relevant. I’m dying to do another agent-based modeling project. Write to me with ideas! Remember, the agents don’t need to be little people. They could be cars, for example–some of which are driverless, say, and some that aren’t. Just a thought!