Policy and Complex Systems
Results
The 1,089 turtles attempting to converse over 31 ticks of the model produces 33,759 opportunities for discussion . When no active readers are present in the environment the total number of discussions that take place over the life of the model regularly approaches 18,000 ( a success rate near 50 %). Figure 2 shows the distribution of successful and failed conversations over the month of January for Random Seed 44 when no turtles take an active interest in discussing current topics from the news .
Tracking the number of conversations initiated by each agent during this run shows 54.62 % of conversation attempts were successful during this run (“ pctyes ” in Figure 2 ). Looking at the performance of individual turtles we see that by the end
of the simulation turtles will have between 4 and 30 conversations , with an average of 16.93 ( SD of 5.422 ) and a mode of 18 ( Figure 3 ).
Increasing the percent-activereader ’ s slider slightly depresses the level of conversation between turtles observed . In Figure 4 we see that a 5 % increase in the number of turtles that keep up with current events drives the total number of discussions that occur in over the life of the simulation down to 13,198 ( a success rate of 39.09 %).
A large increase in the percentactive-readers slider , on the other hand , raises the level of conversation observed between turtles . In Figure 5 ( below ) we see that a 90 % increase in the number of turtles that keep up with current events raises the total number of discussions that occur in over the life of the simulation to 20,388 ( a success rate of 60.39 %).
Figure 2 . Distribution of successful and failed conversations over the month of January .
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