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How could I change the initial conditions in this voter model?

There are agents with four opinions: negative confident, negative unsure, positive unsure, or positive confident. I'm not sure about the correct changes to make it work with setting values independently, i.e. x% negative confident, y% negative unsure, z% positive unsure and w% positive confident (x+y+z+w=100%).

Thank you in advance.

inquirius
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    I'm not able to make sense of this question. What does "make it work with setting values independently" mean? – Seth Tisue May 10 '18 at 08:55
  • Presently initial opinions have equal probability. So instead of having negative confident=positive confident=0.5, I'm seeking to set negative confident=x, negative unsure=y, positive unsure=z, and positive confident=w, with x+y+z+w=1. – inquirius May 11 '18 at 08:49
  • Okay, so what's the difficulty you encountered? What did you try? Where did you get stuck? – Seth Tisue May 12 '18 at 14:00

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Your question can be broken into two separate pieces:

  • how to sample from a multinomial
  • how to put interdependent variables in the interface

The first question has an easy answer. The second question does not. For example, suppose you include 3 sliders for w, x, and y and the compute z=1-w-x-y, how will you ensure z>0? The easiest way around this is to allow setting all 4 independently as relative weights, and then produced your probabilities by scaling each weight (i.e., by dividing by (w + x + y + z). This way you do not have to depend on the user to set sensible combinations of the slider values. (You can rule out having all zeros.)

Alan
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