UNET -- A simulation of social psychology and social network structure

by Jaap Joris Vens, 2011

This program is free, public domain software. There are no restrictions for redistributing and/or modifying it. It comes without any warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law. For more information, see: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Introduction

This is the software that was used my master thesis research, titled:

The Influence of Psychological Processes on the Structure of Social Networks: An Agent-Based Simulation

which can be downloaded at the following location:

http://www.tilburguniversity.edu/about-tilburg-university/schools/humanities/hait/thesisseries/

Thesis committee:

• Dr. Ir. P.H.M. (Pieter) Spronck
• Prof. Dr. E.O. (Eric) Postma

Tilburg center for Creative Computing,

Tilburg University,

The Netherlands.

Compiling the program

Make sure you have the following programs installed:

• GNU Make
• GNU C++ Compiler (g++)

and the following libraries:

• GNU Scientific Library

and typing make at the prompt should produce a binary file called unet.

Running the program

Invoke the program called unet with the following arguments:

• The population size (a positive integer)
• The number of links (a positive integer)
• Assimilation threshold (a real number between 0 and 1)
• Assimilation step (a real number between 0 and 1)
• Link threshold (a real number between 0 and 1)
• optionally: -v for more verbose output

This will produce two streams of output, standard error and standard output. Standard error will show the progress of evolution of the simulated network of agents, along with any status messages if you used the -v argument. Standard output will show the statistics of the final network.

Batch invocation

During my research, I have mostly called this program repeatedly with varying arguments from the shell script run.sh, recording the output streams in files for further analysis.