Victor Blue's Home Page

With JAVA-Based:
Cellular Automata Simulation
of
Pedestrians
and the
N-Person Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma


Cellular Automata (CA) comprise a class of simulation models that are capable of very difficult macroscopic calculations by use of simple microscopic rules over time evolution.  Global properties "emerge" from simple behavioral rules instead of formulas.  The models almost magically capture a simulated reality.  I have linked  this page to several animated CA models that I have developed:

(a) Unidirectional and Bi-directional Pedestrian Flows

(b) Cross-directional and 4-directional Pedestrian Flows

(c) the n-person Iterated Prisioners' Dilemma (IPD) game (here n = 2500).

I hope you find them and the discussion of them of interest.  Send email with comments to: vicblue@ulster.net

Another page has a listing of Research Interests and Publications with downloadable .pdf versions of several of the journal papers that correspond to the pedestrian modeling presented here. In addition the page lists research I have done on Intelligent Transportation Systems (see also ITS America for further information on ITS).

More about CA models:  The unidirectional, bi-directional, cross-, and 4-directional pedestrian models have been presented at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meetings in 1998, 1999, and 2000 as well as at other conferences (see presented and published work under Curriculum Vita and Research Interests and Publications).  The pedestrian models Dr. Jeff Adler and I have created exhibit emergent fundamental pedestrian flows from localized pedestrian rules.  My pedestrian models were originally written in C/C++ and I transported the code to JAVA based on insights from the web site of Andreas Ehrencrona (with the author's permission). His site has a good explanation of Cellular automata (CA) and the "Life" CA Game. Many other excellent web sites of CA modeling exist.

My interest in CA modeling extends to game theory and multi-agent systems.  The n-person iterated Prisoners' Dilemma work is based on a program presented in Scientific American June 1995.  This web site gratefully acknowledges the work of  M. Nowak, R. May, and K. Sigmund and the presentation in the Amateur Scientist of the same issue of SA by Alan Lloyd.  This animated depiction of the Prisioners' Dilemma is meant to be of help to students of game theory and CA modeling.  Enjoy.

Also try Exploring Emergence and  Artificial Life Online for further explanations and examples of CA.  Check out  TRANSIMS for research ongoing with CA vehicular traffic simulations pioneered by Kai Nagel. Also, the models of Craig Reynolds and Dirk Helbing, though not CA models, may be of interest because their models deal with self-organization of individual, autonomous agents.

Victor Blue (revised May 27, 2000).