Motivation, Recent Progress, and Next Steps
What Motivates us?
BlockScience decided to release cadCAD as open source software because we believe that simulation and modeling are an integral part of design and analysis of complex systems. Data science as field brings advanced computational methods to the analysis of systems, but due to its dependence on extant data has a naturally backward-facing perspective. In systems engineering, data driven methods are combined with simulation and modeling to engineer complex systems capable of adapting to uncertainty and even adversarial conditions.
The users of cadCAD work with social and economic systems, and the concepts being modeled are various forms of algorithmic policy, which shares its mathematical roots with robotics and control theory. Our ongoing commitment to the community is to build bridges in the form of methods, tools and education around the design, testing and analysis of technology mediated social and economic networks.
Twitter callout to community.cadcad.org discussion of the role of simulation and modeling in healthy institutions
What has been accomplished lately?
- The cadCAD Gitcoin grant raised 2,216 DAI from 66 unique contributors, of which 1,267 DAI came from CLR matching round 4.
- Our first cadCAD Gitcoin bounty was released, completed and paid. It consisted of extending the Robot & Marbles tutorials to include the parameter sweep feature.
- A cadCAD model of the Uniswap ETH-DAI pair was developed and backtested with data. Thanks Markus Buhatem Koch!
Constant Product Market Maker as a Special Case of Invariant Preserving Configuration Space
- A canonical system model of Predator Prey Dynamics has been implemented as an Agent Based Model (ABM) and a System Dynamics (SD) Model, both using cadCAD. Thanks Danilo Lessa Bernardineli!
- A handful of questers have embarked on the extensive Modeling & Simulation Quest Tree laid out in the MetaGame!
- Academic research on cryptoeconomic systems including using cadCAD for computational methods has been ramping up.
Foundations of Cryptoeconomic Systems at MIT March 7–8, 2020
- Community engagement and contributions are rising. For example, this curation of Token Engineering educational material by Tannr Allard from the Nervos Network, and this demonstration of the eth2 beacon chain dynamics by Barnabe Monnot at the Ethereum Foundation.
What comes next?
Gitcoin CLR round 5 goes live 2020–03–23, please contribute to our cadCAD grant as we continue to maintain the software while expanding the demos, tutorials, and other educational materials. All funds raised via Gitcoin are distributed back into the cadCAD community. Specifically, three new bounties are being released!
- Marketing Funnel — as a data scientist or startup executive, I wish to track my dynamically managed resources to balance expenditures across marketing, sales and retention in order to grow my business.
- Verifiers Dilemma — as a validator operator or platform designer for an environment where rewards are earned by catching faults, I wish to estimate expected rewards accounting for strategic behavior.
- Three Sided Market — as community member or platform designer for a cooperative business model, I want to load balance supply and demand for both labor and capital so that we provide a good user experience for service providers, service consumers and platform providers at the same time.
Each of the above bounties will be worth 500 DAI and will consist of updating, adapting and expanding cadCAD demo models created as part of the original cadCAD beta program. The bounties will be released via detailed Github issues on staggered basis. This work is funded by our Gitcoin CLR campaign 4 funds.
To help keep this program going please contribute to our grant during Gitcoin CLR campaign 5! Please continue to support our efforts to make modeling and simulation a standard practice.
Join the conversation or dive into the code!
About BlockScience
BlockScience® is a complex systems engineering, R&D, and analytics firm. Our goal is to combine academic-grade research with advanced mathematical and computational engineering to design safe and resilient socio-technical systems. We provide engineering, design, and analytics services to a wide range of clients, including for-profit, non-profit, academic, and government organizations, and contribute to open-source research and software development.
