Hi, I'm Jackie Kazil, 
one of the original creators of Mesa.

And I'm Tom Pike. I'm one of the 
developers on Team Mesa,

and I'll be walking you through 
the tutorial.

Mesa is an open-source, Python 3 library

that allows users to quickly create 
agent-based models

using a decoupled architecture.

Mesa includes the ability to run 
browser-based visualisations,

but also the ability to run headless.

Being built in Python, it gives users
the ability to take advantage of

other tools in the Python ecosystem 
for data handling

such as Pandas, NetworkX, 
Jupyter notebooks, and more.

Over the next several lessons,

in order to learn some Mesa, some Python,

and some things about 
agent-based modelling,

we'll be building 
the seminal model

'Sugarscape with Traders',

created by Rob Axtell and Josh Epstein.

In order to do this, I'll be 
demonstrating the code

through Google's Jupyter environment, 
which is known as Colab.

This is free to anyone 
with a Google account,

although you can use

whichever integrated development 
environment you would like.

Each session of code will be available

through Santa Fe Institute's
Complexity Explorer GitHub

and all the code is available 
in .py files

through Mesa's examples repositories,

found on its GitHub page.

In the first lesson, we'll be
talking to Rob Axtell,

one of the co-creators of the 
Sugarscape model.

As you move through the lessons,

please don't hesitate to ask questions.

We hope you enjoy this tutorial.