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Getting started

A first hour with Community Lab IDE: watch the province live, look inside it, read its experience, ask it a question, and do the same from files. Each step links to the page that covers it in full.

1. Start the clock

The app opens on Unity Province at dawn on its first day, paused. Press Space. At the default speed, a simulated minute a second, the province wakes: people get up, eat, and leave for work and school, on foot, by car, by bus, by minibus taxi and on the Hyperline.

Press 5 for an hour a second, 3 to come back to a minute a second. Time and the clock has every speed.

2. Pick someone and follow them

Scroll to zoom in on a settlement, and double-click a person to follow them. Press ] to open the inspector: their age, work and payslip, their family, their health, their mood, their plan for today, the people they are closest to, their life so far. Click household to see the household they belong to, its finances and this month's accounts. Esc steps back out. People, households and places.

3. Go to church on Sunday

Click the clock in the top bar and choose Sunday service. The clock moves to the next Sunday at 09:00, and every day in between is simulated. Fly to Emmaus or Ithemba (the buttons on the right), zoom into a church, and watch the congregation gather; the pastor preaches, and every twenty minutes or so the room sings a hymn. Click the pastor while he speaks to read the sermon's transcript. Conversations.

4. Look closer

Keep zooming into a house and the map becomes the 3D close-up: the camera swings down to the street, the rooms open like a doll's house, and every resident is built from the simulation's own record of them. Hold the right mouse button and move to look about; hold it and press W A S D to fly. Wheel out to come back to the map. The 3D close-up.

5. Let the years run

Press 9: a year a second. Let ten years go by, then Space to pause.

Click the Mortality A/E tile on the strip along the bottom. The drawer shows the province's deaths against the deaths its basis expected, by age band and sex, with intervals; ⤢ makes it full screen. Then Population for the pyramid and the year-by-year table. With four hundred people the figures are noisy, and the intervals say how noisy. Analytics, Mortality and experience.

6. Open the books

Click Economy: GDP, inflation, the repo rate, unemployment. Go down the rail to Micro for supply and demand in the produce market, Books for any household's or business's journal and statements, and Audit, where verify chain re-checks every entry of the hash-chained journal. Economy and finance.

Then click Actuarial: the burial society priced on the province's own table, its loading, its adjustment coefficient and a fan of a thousand simulated futures against its capital. The actuarial workbench.

7. Ask a question

Click Policy lab. The first template, SAM life stresses on the burial society, lives the province with mortality 15% heavier at every age, and with a catastrophe month, against the default province, on eight seeds of ten years each. Press Run on the server. When it finishes, read the forest of effects: each change's effect on the society's reserve, its chance of ruin and its loss ratio, with a 95% interval, and in how many of the eight seeds it went the better way. The policy and stress lab.

8. Do it from files

Press Ctrl+2 for the workbench, and on its welcome screen, Create the sample workspace (File › New Workspace brings the welcome screen back). Then, in the explorer:

  1. Open scripts/first-look.js and press Ctrl+Enter. A province of the script's own lives two years beside the editor, and the Console fills with its indicators, who lives where, and the last births and deaths.
  2. Open scenarios/ageing.province.json and run it. The province on screen is rebuilt on an older population with lower fertility, and the app switches to it; Ctrl+2 to come back.
  3. Open experiments/old-age-grant.experiment.json, change "seeds": 8 to 12, and run it. It goes to the worker pool; when it is done its result is in results/ and in the lab.

The workbench, Scripts, The sample workspace.

9. Take the data with you

Click Exports in the top bar. Mortality experience › Pool on the worker pool lives the province's basis on sixteen seeds and pools their deaths and exposure; Save to workspace writes it into the workspace as CSV, with a README and the true basis it was generated on. Fit a table to it in R or Python, and score the fit against the answer. Exports and data.

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