Electronic Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual International Conference on Technology in Collegiate MathematicsBoston, Massachusetts, March 21-24, 2013Paper S081
Agent-Based and Community, Modeling, Netlogo and the 2012 Presidential Election |
Frank WattenbergUnited States Military Academy list of all papers by this author | Csilla SzaboRensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
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ABSTRACT
In the Spring and Fall of 2012 the authors used the 2012 election as a rich and engaging modeling topic in our Mathematical Modeling courses. This paper talks about our work modeling the general election in the Fall semester. The class developed an agent-based, community model with each student contributing several parts of the model. Our goal was not prediction but rather the development of a model. This paper does not talk about other work on the primaries and congressional districting. A longer and more complete version of this paper including those topics is available from either of the two authors. We used NetLogo with mixed results. It would be better to use a general-purpose, object-oriented language but, alas, fewer students seem to be learning such languages these days.Keyword(s): applications, modeling