Computational considerations for a global human well-being simulation

Abstract

Global scale human simulations have application in diverse fields such as economics, anthropology and marketing. The sheer number of agents, however, makes them extremely sensitive to variations in algorithmic complexity resulting in potentially prohibitive computational resource costs. In this paper we show that the computational capability of modern servers has increased to the point where billions of individual agents can be modeled on moderate institutional resources and (in a few years) on high end consumer systems. We close with the proposition of future frameworks to enable collaborative modelling of the global human population.