At 03:59 PM 4/21/2004, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>in the real world, we often know quite a lot about the (mathematical and
>physcial) relations between various physical properties of the world, but
>we do not know their (exact) values and have no way to find out about
>them. I think something similar should hold for disaster simulations:
>there are things we can observe (e.g. how strong is a fire right now,
>what's the wind direction, what material is a house made of) and some
>things we can not, but know about their importance (like the amount of
>burnable material in the house, statical information about the building,
>etc.). So, if the disaster simulator has such information (coming from a
>config file unknown to the agents (like polydata) or resulting from some
>randomized computation) agents will have to interpolate from their
>observations to predetermine the course of the disaster. So, in my
>personal opinion, agents can know about the physics but not about
>unobservable parameters.
In general I agree, except that those parameters maybe grouped into
classes, that are known. I found the restrictions about prior knowledge on
buildings on the map always a bit too strict. In reality the firebrigade
has made a risk-assesment, and knows for instance where dangerous industry
is located. How dangerous at this situation they do not know, but they will
be a big difference with burning office-buildings. The same holds for
ambulances (busy places as stations) and police forces (important routes).
Regards,
Arnoud Visser
University of Amsterdam
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