The brainchild of Vincent Ocasla, Magnasanti is the scary outcome of what happens when you try to 'beat' SimCity 3000 through years of equations and graph paper drawings: six million residents, no water pollution, no traffic congestion, no crime, all in the package of an unbelievably dense hellscape. Students will develop software and methods to. You can read the rest of my exploration of the complexity of cities via SimCity here.Īnd as a bonus: another example of using science and mathematics to delve into SimCity is the theory that underlies the creation of the city Magnasanti. Prerequisites: upper-division standing or consent of instructor. What this means is that for each additional simulated individual in a city, the algorithmic complexity increases by a constant amount. It turns out that urban complexity scales linearly with population: Using a small dataset of population sizes and file sizes of some cities constructed in SimCity 3000, I checked to see how complexity scales with population size. And each file is a city’s complete description, so its file size is, in a rough sense, a measure of its complexity. we can easily use SimCity to measure a city’s Kolmogorov complexity, because we have files for each simulated city in SimCity.
