While perusing Slashdot today, I saw a mention of EVE Online’s use of the TMS RamSan.  It reminded me of another Slashdot post of a couple months ago, about EVE Online’s own economist.  Here is a link: http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/09/13/156240.shtml

Some of the economist’s comments (scarcity, banking, etc.) made me wonder whether it would ever be possible to discover real-world economics laws through simulation rather than thought experiment.  This idea is of special interest to me, as I write software for simulations myself.  Maybe future simulations will become sufficiently accurate to allow entrepreneurial forecasting (for a single plan)?  Of course, the inherent hostile environment in today’s RPG’s would skew any results too much to be useful.

Even farther into the future is the possibility of general artificial intelligences that run simulations to determine their actions toward goals.  Although, I don’t know enough about AI to speculate how one would program the underlying dissatisfaction into them to get them to posit goals in the first place. 

Supposedly, the EVE Online economist is going to produce quarterly reports of the economic development of the game’s world.