Jack Calhoun was an ethologist at NIMH from the early 1960’s into the 1980’s. He most famously studied overpopulation by constructing rat “universes” where the species had plenty of food and no predators. A theoretically rich article that the produced was “Space and the Strategy of Life” (1971). This article is a sprawling theoretical novel about a few inductions he had derived to explain his observations among the rats. Within this article is a description of a Mythematical Social Pool Game, a uniquely precise set of rules for a model of the rat emotional system.
As with all models, it inserts assumptions – reductions of observed complexity – to make a point. These mechanical reductions serve as control variables that limit the models expression to the relationships between particular variables. “All things being equal…” as Dr. Bowen would say.
The following is a software reproduction of Calhoun’s Mythematical Social Pool Game. It reveals the relationships between the independent variable provided when played over time. The source code for this model is freely available here: https://github.com/patrickkidd/systems-models. As with qualitative coding techniques, the source code includes quotes from Calhoun’s original article next to each assumption in the agent model so that subsequent critics can refine the model.
