May 2026: Agent-based modeling with MESA

63 priests, 117 ministers, and 84 rabbis walk into a bar. What happens next? You’ll never figure that out from first principles. You’re going to have to simulate the behavior of an individual - an “agent” - then put them together, let them interact, and see what happens. That’s the principle of “agent-based modeling”; you can describe each “agent”, but to find out how they will interact en masse, you simulate the situation and watch.

Mesa is a Python package to make agent-based modeling easy, attractive, and yes - it can be fun.

Location: Innovation Hub

We meet in the Innovation Hub, a gorgeous new facility that’s part of the renovated Dayton Arcade complex.
Enter through the doors that face the Wright Stop Plaza bus hub.

Street parking is free in the evening. I usually park on Ludlow Street.

or

if for any reason coming downtown doesn’t work for you (for instance, you’ve been exposed to COVID, or you’ve converted yourself to purely digital format and now exist as a set of cloud-hosted algorithms), we’ll be online as well!

Join us at 7 PM EDT on the PyFri Discord channel, discord.gg/9SgTh3T, and click on the General voice chat link. You may need to install the Discord desktop app rather than just using the web interface.