Classic Model from Complex Systems: The El Farol Bar Problem

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I recently attended a conference at the Santa Fe Institute.  During the trip, I made a point of eating at the El Farol Bar & Restaurant. This restaurant holds a special place in the lore of complex systems.  Thus, I thought I would take the opportunity to highlight the model on the CLS blog.  

Here is a subset of the model description…. “The bar is popular — especially on Thursday nights when they offer Irish music — but sometimes becomes overcrowded and unpleasant. In fact, if the patrons of the bar think it will be overcrowded they stay home; otherwise they go enjoy themselves at El Farol. This model explores what happens to the overall attendance at the bar on these popular Thursday evenings, as the patrons use different strategies for determining how crowded they think the bar will be.”   

The original paper written by Brian Arthur is located here. An interesting follow up paper employing reinforcement learning is located here.    This above is a screen print from the Netlogo model.  Netlogo offers an easy interface useful for exploring a variety of agent based models.  

The model will run in your browser provided you have Java 1.4.1+.  

To run the El Farol model, please go here.   

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