Resolving a Replication That Failed: News on the Macy & Sato Model

The paper at hand aimes at identifying the assumptions that lead to the results presented in an article by Michael Macy and Yoshimichi Sato published in PNAS. In answer to a failed replication, the authors provided the source code of their model and here the results of carefully studying that code a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of artificial societies and social simulation 2009-10, Vol.12 (4)
Main Author: Will, Oliver
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Methodology (Data Analysis)
Methodology (Data Collection)
Simulation
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The paper at hand aimes at identifying the assumptions that lead to the results presented in an article by Michael Macy and Yoshimichi Sato published in PNAS. In answer to a failed replication, the authors provided the source code of their model and here the results of carefully studying that code are presented. The main finding is that the simulation program implements an assumption that is most probably an unwilling, unintended, and unwanted implication of the code. This implied assumption is never mentioned in Macy and Sato's article and if the authors wanted to program what they describe in their article then it is due to a programming error. After introducing the reader to the discussion, data that stem from a new replication based on the assumptions extracted from the source code is compared with the results published in Macy and Sato's original article. The replicated results are sufficiently similar to serve as a strong indicator that this new replication implements the same relevant assumptions as the original model. Afterwards it is shown that a removal of the dubious assumption leads to results that are dramatically different from those published in Macy and Sato's PNAS article. Adapted from the source document.
ISSN:1460-7425
1460-7425