Towards an Ideal Social Simulation Language

The problem of social simulation is analysed, identifying what I call 'syntactic' and 'semantic' complexity. These mean that social simulation has particular needs in terms of computational tools. I suggest an approach where one identifies, documents and checks constraints from a variety of sources. Eight criteria for a computational tool to support social simulation are proposed and illustrated using the language SDML. I speculate that a general tool for developing, running and comparing sets of models and results could greatly aid social simulation. This would help manage the clusters of closely related models that social systems seem to necessitate.

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