Comments on: Simulating Trends: Why “Twilight” Is So Damn Popular

By: Audun Wilhelmsen

Audun Wilhelmsen — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:20:35 +0000

I think I would have liked to see what happened if you created a mechanic that make individuals “tired” of trends. When they’ve worn the same color for 5-15 generations, they have a buffer of about 10 generations where they don’t want to wear that color. Hopefully large blocks of individuals who adopted a trend would hopefully switch away from it rapidly, to allow a new block to form.

By: nato

nato — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:12:06 +0000

An idea for choosing an ‘alternate’ trend would be that rather than choosing the most popular automatically, they choose randomly, with the probability weighted by the relative popularity of the other trends.

By: Derek

Derek — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:27:34 +0000

Thanks for the gifs chkno! Once the sim converges to a super trend there really seems to be no hope for smaller trends to rise up.
Implementing a “memory” might fix that. Something like:

getNewRandomShirt()
{
do while ( ! (notWearingThatColor AND haven’tWornThatColorInAWhile) )
color = newRandomColor()
}

By: chkno

chkno — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:40:29 +0000

This method doesn’t appear to allow new trends to arise. The initial trends just war until one of them wins. Here are some movies of runs to 3000 generations (5MB each) :

http://chkno.net/trendsim1.gif (Black wins)

http://chkno.net/trendsim2.gif (Green wins)

http://chkno.net/trendsim3.gif (Yellow wins)