Jon

I really like the clean coding style you have adopted here. The use of agents identified as Associations with updated properties and an updating rule is one that can be modified for a wide range of stochastic problems with a large number of parameters. I used agent models for economics and finance back in the 90's. Whenever I tried to model neoliberal economic models as advocated by the Chicago School of economics, I found that they only ever worked if you assumed everything worked perfectly like your experiment No 2 with immediate 100% isolation and that everyone in the market had perfect knowledge of prices. Such situations only arose about one in every 100,000 experiments. Journals were not interested in such experiments, especially since corporations owned the journals. Strange how that happens.

Michael

Of course. This was meant to be a simple model and the illustration of an approach.

By adding many more property keys (each persons social calendar, spatial environment, type of current activity etc) and more complex update rules (going to places in the caledar, calculating the type of contact based on each agents current location and activity) one could model that.

Though performance will likely become a consideration.

Those features are relevant to disease progress, of course, and for some interventions. But my key reservation concerns the nature (patterns, types) of social mixing. Randomness could play some role (people may bump into each other 'randomly', once in a while). But large part of interactions are structured, along the lines mentioned by Jon. One example is Christopher Wolfram model, based on social network structure. We are working on IBM with structured social mixing that goes beyond networks, and we are planning to post it soon.