Economy simulation

[Douglas Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

This makes me feel really stupid.  I should have remembered this at least a
month ago.

Probably 15 years ago I was talking to a high school student who was involved
 in an InterNation Simulation (INS).  Some of you educators are probably
familiar with this.  It's a simulation where teams of students play the roles
 of various countries and interact as countries would.  I wasn't clear on the
 point of this and asked Jim (the student) to describe a session to me.  He
said, "Oh there's usually a nuclear war by the fifth or sixth turn."  I was
aghast--what did the teachers think was being taught here?  Jim said, "It's
just that people get bored by that point and that's about all there is to
keep them interested."  I vowed to write a better simulation with some actual
 educational value.

I finally came up with my simulation, Alterra.  In it, teams play the roles
of countries or international agents (international corporations,
non-governmental organizations, the press, etc.).  The system is intended to
be a simplified input/output model of a global economy, with agriculture,
manufacturing, resource extraction, trade, war, taxation, unemployment, and a
 host of other details for the teams to think about.  Each team gets to
decide privately what end they wish to try to optimize their play towards,
and may switch to a different goal during the simulation if they want.  The
simulation doesn't end at a predetermined turn so as to prevent players from
adopting an "end-game" strategy.

I have the rules, reporting forms, and action submission forms all worked
out.  The system has unfortunately never been properly tested and so will
need some (perhaps a great deal) of debugging.  However, the rules and forms
constitute a fairly complete design spec.

I had thought on and off over the past few years about putting this up on a
website, as the forms seemed to me to be ready-made for HTML forms.  Now that
 I think about it, Alterra could work extremely well off of a Linux server
using the kind of database backend Justin Bradford described a little while
ago.

When I get to work tomorrow I'll hunt out my Alterra material, put it into
passable HTML, and post it to the seul-edu webpage.  When I get that done
I'll let you know and you can take a look at it and tell me how silly it is.
 If it passes that test, maybe we can put it together as a networked economic
 simulation.

--
Doug Loss            An idealist is one who, on noticing that
dloss@csrlink.net    roses smell better than cabbage, concludes
(717) 326-3987       that they will also make better soup.
                        H. L. Mencken