Building N Birds With 1 Store: Parallel Simulations of Stochastic Evolutionary Processes
Citation
Janitsch, William. 2015. Building N Birds With 1 Store: Parallel Simulations of Stochastic Evolutionary Processes. Bachelor's thesis, Harvard College.Abstract
Stochastic processes are used to study the dynamics of evolution in finite, structured populations. Simulations of such processes provide a useful tool for their study, but are currently limited by computational speed and memory bottlenecks, even when naively parallelized. This thesis proposes two novel parallelization methods for simulating a particular class of evolutionary processes known as "games on graphs." The theoretical speed-up and scalability of these methods is analyzed across various parameters. A novel approximate parallel method is also proposed, which allows for further speed-up at the expense of some accuracy. Discussion of implementation considerations follows, and a resulting implementation in Python is used to provide empirical performance results which match closely with theoretical ones. Applications are suggested for a variety of open problems in biology, behavioral economics, political science, and linguistics.Terms of Use
This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAACitable link to this page
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:14398531
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