{"id":99,"date":"2020-05-01T15:39:42","date_gmt":"2020-05-01T15:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/?p=99"},"modified":"2020-05-01T15:47:02","modified_gmt":"2020-05-01T15:47:02","slug":"tolstoys-allusion-to-computational-social-science-in-war-and-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/?p=99","title":{"rendered":"Tolstoy&#8217;s Allusion to Computational Social Science in &#8220;War and Peace&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I&#8217;ve been meaning to read this book for years and have finally gotten around to it.  About 65% of the way into the book, as a preamble to describing Napoleon&#8217;s capture of Moscow and subsequent retreat I ran into an amazing short chapter (Book Eleven: 1812 Chapter I,  to be found online at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/2600\/2600-h\/2600-h.htm#link2H_4_0240\">http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/2600\/2600-h\/2600-h.htm#link2H_4_0240<\/a>).  In this chapter Tolstoy starts by describing paradoxes in classical physics and their mathematical models (Zeno&#8217;s paradox) and how they are essentially resolved using calculus.  He then goes on to apply this by analogy to the &#8220;movement&#8221; of nations in history in a way that foreshadow modern research in computational social science.  (See for example, Ian Lustick&#8217;s work on agent-based models for populations, e.g. <a href=\"http:\/\/jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk\/3\/1\/1.html\">http:\/\/jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk\/3\/1\/1.html<\/a>).  Pretty remarkable for a book written in 1867!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been meaning to read this book for years and have finally gotten around to it. About 65% of the way into the book, as a preamble to describing Napoleon&#8217;s capture of Moscow and subsequent retreat I ran into an amazing short chapter (Book Eleven: 1812 Chapter I, to be found online at http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/2600\/2600-h\/2600-h.htm#link2H_4_0240). In &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/?p=99\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Tolstoy&#8217;s Allusion to Computational Social Science in &#8220;War and Peace&#8221;<\/span>Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[16,15,17,18],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ontsandquants.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}