space syntax3 theory vs practice and ABM

Marvin Malecha during his lecture on our university said ”in theory is no difference between theory and practise in practise there is” so funny enough that these famous quote by American athlete is so universal that can be applicable everywhere - space syntax and ABM including

world of these analysis is truly attractive. Wouldn't be marvellous to have tools which can make space experience judgement objective and assimilations of danger situations possible.?for the need of this entry let's say it would. Unfortunately when you are going deeper and deeper in the subject you can fill a little bit like on Peter Eisenman's project presentation session. You see graphs and maps which represents fe. Relation between metro accessibility and prices of apartment and there is no doubt that these is rather sophisticated tool. But when you want to do these sort of map yourself it is not so easy to find clear explanation ow it was done. So can we trust it?

Going even deeper in the subject I got two discoveries. First one encouraging was that people who investigate these subjects are generally more scientist then magicians. At least some of them present mathematical rules which where used in calculations. Some of them do not show back stage but still they are sort of convincing http://www.geosimulation.org/geosim/abms.htm. As far as ABM are concerned, second discovery is not so encouraging... nothing is really tested yet and if you want to do something you basically have to do it yourself. Only very simple things are ready to use for public. What I mean, you have to basicaly write program yourself.

http://www.swarm.org/index.php/Main_Page

so it is rather a pilosophy of simulating sistems than tools

even if you go to

http://www.swarm.org/index.php/Tools_for_Agent-Based_Modelling

an you think that you will get some simple tool you can find mostly fully programmable environments

like http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/

so it is a great thing if you really want to do something and have full contorted of it but if you are an architect an you just want to examine your propositions it is just too much of a trouble.

Most of these software are home made that why they are not stable. And if you find something more user friendlily like

http://www.xjtek.com/

it not free anymore....

CONCLUSION

If for each model I have to basically develop my system from the search maybe it is better to just do mah by your self and just present clue points of solutions instead of becoming a programmer, because in few years standard architectural will have simple ABM analysis inside them. It is truly interested topic for group of researchers from various fields but if somebody is focused on designing it is probably not the most important thing for time investment.