Lord of the Rings

I thought I should provide a bit of background as to why I'm spending two months in Burkina Faso. I'll try and be quick however in an attempt to avoid that glazed-over-eyes look people seem to get when I start talking about my PhD. The aim is to make an agent-based model of how changes in climate affect migration of people in BF. If you are not in the know (as I wasn't until I started my PhD), an agent-based model is a computer simulation where the actions of individuals (agents) affect the behaviour of all the other agents in the system, producing interesting and unforseen outcomes. As that makes no real sense, here is an alternative description.....

In one of the Lord of the Rings films where they have a huge battle scene with many angry characters fighting as they do, rather than draw (or CGI) each of the characters fighting, they made an agent-based model. For each character made, the film people assigned a set of rules of behaviour that would define their actions. So, if an Orc was running into battle, his rules might be "if opponent smaller than you, fight them" and "if opponent bigger than you, run away". So each set of characters had rules of behaviour that led to a big fight. In essence, the aim of my PhD is the same. I need to find out the rules of behaviour that lead people in Burkina Faso to leave their homes in search of a better life. Hopefully the rules I find will be a little more subtle and end in less bloodshed.

p.s. The precise details of the Lord of the Rings stuff might be a little sketchy but I'm told its true!