Analysis: An Introduction

In many systems considered in this book, computation is an emergent property of a large population of interacting individuals. The role of analysis is to uncover and validate the microscopic mechanisms that govern an individual’s behavior. The products of analysis are descriptive models and theories of individual behavior, and a framework that explains the collective behavior that arises from interactions among many individuals. In addition to being descriptive, the models are often used to predict emergent collective behavior and motivate the design of future human computational algorithms and user interfaces that support them.