The First Week: May 15 - May 19
Once I had taken care of administrative things like getting an ID card
and a key, Amy and I discussed potential projects to work on for the
summer. She gave me a copy of her thesis and a few papers to read to
help me decide on a project. I chose our topic fairly quickly, and we
both started reading, in an effort to get up to speed on the background
we needed. The papers we read discussed various agent algorithms and
market structures. We created a list of the algorithms that we had read
about, and we began to compare and contrast them. Three of the
algorithms we looked at were:
ZIC traders
ZIP traders
GD traders
Toward the end of the week we also got the code for the simulator that
had been developed at the IBM lab. I went to work on familiarizing
myself with the code right away. It was the first time I had worked in C
(I'm used to C++) but things went faster than I expected, and by the
second week, we were ready to start experimenting with the agents and the
simulator.