Ant colony simulator

Should also second the mention that SimAnt is awesome.

I wasted many many of my childhood days playing that game, and feeling the rush everytime my hoard of ants took down a huge freaking spider.

Simant lost a lot of its appeal once I worked out I could enter a new zone and queen-rush the enemy with a 50/50 chance of winning, and just send in a new queen if I failed.

For me all the various SimSomething games were more about figuring the rules, limits and possible abuses of the simulation design than the intended actual game.

I did a course on modelling complex systems for my honours studies; this was one of the recommended readings. I'm glad I bought it.

Most books about systems modelling refer to one of the commercial modelling programs. Or they are quite generic and hand-wavy. The nice thing about TTATJ is that the software (NetLogo) is downloadable[1]. The book is on the Kindle too, which is convenient.

[1] http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

I love modeling traffic jams. Was one of my first hands-on experiments with NetLogo.

If you're like me, you might find interesting this recent paper on the topic of the economics of parking: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2277553

Pick up Thomas Schelling's Micro Motives and Macro Behavior; he originated many of these models (the most mind-blowing to me was that a small segregation preference among individuals balloons into way more segregation than was desired just because of physical constraints inherent in the geometry of neighborhoods).