YWiC (58)

Utopia
The YWiC Young Women in Computing team (#58) is from Las Cruces.

Awards
Teamwork

Team Members

 * Marie Ellis
 * Hiba Muhyi
 * Noor Muhyi
 * Cindy Yeh
 * Samantha McGuinn

Sponsoring Teacher

 * Rebecca Galves

Proposal
http://mode.lanl.k12.nm.us/get_proposal1112.php?team_id=58

Many countries have certain features that are considered idyllic; however, each country has its own imperfections. Our goal is to combine traits of various publics in order to create a utopian civilization. Unstable communal characteristics—such as those in constant war with themselves, economic distress, and in unsanitary environments —lead to these societies’ degradation as a whole. It is important to have a sound society because they thrive, and it would then be the epitome of stability. Our motivations for creating a utopian civilization are the shocking amount of war and poverty in many societies.

Our plan can be executed in three simple steps: researching statistics that compare the most successful and least successful societies from the past and present, planning out our program based on our extensive research, and building a computer simulation using NetLogo. In this simulation, we hope to eliminate the most prominent problems countries face and integrate the best features of successful countries into variables in our program. The variables we plan to use in our program are: education, economics, law/ law enforcement, health care/ sanitation, population, geographic location, and self sustainability. If a country were to base their government off of our project it would be difficult to make instant reforms, but an emerging society based on our project would be successful.

Interim Report
http://mode.lanl.k12.nm.us/get_interim1112.php?team_id=58

Denizens of the United States thrive while those in Bhutan struggle to survive. What factors contribute to such extremities amongst societies? Because of the expanding gaps and widening margins between countries, Team Utopia aspires to bridge these gaps by analyzing and adjusting detrimental features of a civilization to ameliorate the quality of living in all neighborhoods. With our models, we hope to give countries an opportunity to emulate the world we plan to create and begin to prosper as idealized communities.

After collecting and comparing data--such as economic conditions, population growth, and educational success rates--about and between countries on both ends of the National Power Index (NPI), we have gathered enough information to finalize our list of variables to be used in our NetLogo project. Our variables now include economic conditions, law/ law enforcement, health care/ sanitation, population, geographic location, government involvement, and self-sustainability. These components allow us to enter data into our code and observe to what degree each attribute affects a population. As of the present, we have defined our variables and created functions to adjust whether certain factors may benefit or harm the model environment. The most obvious problem we are currently facing includes the ability--or inability--to quantify some of our variables. However, though this glaring dilemma has caused some obstruction, we have ultimately decided that the “chooser” feature on NetLogo will enable us to pinpoint descriptions of certain variables. Inserting distinct conditions of variables will then allow us to integrate into our code the significance of each factor.

Controlling our variables allows our society to have low crime rates, high reproduction rates, an expanding economy, a growing number of resources, and an agreeable government. We can also observe the dependency of variables upon other variables as well. Through graph and data outputs we are able to collect data that can be used to implement our model into the real world. Although we do not expect immediate change, because instant successful reforms are impossible to make, we hope our model will be ideal for emerging nations and, in the long run, free the world from impoverished villages.

Because we understand that some may be skeptical of the reliability of our model, we have begun to create a website with GoogleSites, allowing us to organize our thoughts and present the validity of our project. Even if the outcomes we obtain may not be what we expect, we know our project will have positive results. Perhaps higher crime rates will unify a society and thus lead to the cohesion and happiness of a society. Perhaps a simple economy will cause higher production and exportation rates. Perhaps a disagreeable government will cook up controversy and reformations. Whatever the outcomes, Team Utopia will keep in mind all possibilities--both expected and unexpected--while creating the flawless paradise.

Introduction
Hi,

My name is Jon Brown, and the challenge has asked me to look over your interim report. I am a grad student at New Mexico Tech, if you like there is more information on my background and work on my User Page.

Progress
It looks like you spent a good amount of time researching and have started experimenting with NetLogo, this is good progress, but you need to start nailing down the specifics of your model.

Mentors
If you do not yet have a mentor, please contact consult or see here for help in finding a mentor to help you with this ambitious project.

Model
It's not clear to me from your interim what your model does. You mention the inputs/variables and that the interact somehow, but what are the rules of these interactions?

From your description it looks like there might be two different things you want to model. One is the interaction between the citizens and the government (building a utopian government/society), and the other is the interaction between different countries (avoiding war/starvation or poverty). These, I think, would be very difficult to do in a single model, so it'd be better to choose just one, and even then simplify the scope of your project into a doable level.

In either case, your language of choice being netlogo, a good choice is an agent based model, and you need to think about specific rules that you want your model to follow.

Some quick brainstorming: For the government/people model the agents would be the people themselves. What do the agents do and how they interact? For example, if you want to study starvation, the agents can collect (renewable?) food according to some rules. Perhaps the choice of government/economic system affects these rules (i.e. communism vs capitalism, etc). How do these agent interact with each other? how do they (and the government) deal with criminals?

For the countries idea: the agents would be the countries. Each country can have a supply/demand for resources (food/fuel/etc) based on population, and maybe other factors. Then the countries need to decide to act peacefully trading for the things they need or to go to war for them. This (relatively) simple idea can lead to complex choices for the agents to make: are there cases where going to war actually makes sense? What if another country is won't trade or being warlike? What if there aren't enough resources to go around? Different agents could have different strategies for providing for their people (and, in fact, global politics is sometimes thought of in terms of game theory; a simple example of which is the prisoner's dilemma which shows a case where individuals/entities might not cooperate).

You don't have to follow anything I've laid out here (it might be too complex to implement), but start thinking about a simple set of rules/equations that you want to use that define your model.

Face to Face Evaluation
Your next milestone is a face to face evaluation in February.

Rubrics
The judges will use these rubrics to evaluate your projects. Use them as checklists for what you need to communicate to the judges.


 * Expo Judges Rubric
 * Finalist Judges Rubric