ABSTRACT
The book now departs from the viewpoint and language of immunology and adopts those of a computational modeller. The writer is an alien who happens to meet an immunologist at a time when computational immunology was unsuspected in Italy. He will fi rst tell how this meeting took place. Then, in the following sections, he will show how the immunological concepts described in the preceding sections have been translated into a computational model. Successively, he will illustrate the model at work, that is, simulations’ results will be commented on to give a sense of how one can experiment with it. The choice of simple examples is not casual but is aimed at keeping complexity at bay. Alien modellers know that the usefulness of a mathematical model is to be found halfway between triviality and extreme complexity. To give the impression that IMMSIM is exceedingly complicated would be a fault. The correct key to understanding it is to view it as the holistic combination of simple sub-models, each enacting a ‘concept’ or describing a ‘phenomenon’ of the immune system. These concepts are nothing less and nothing more than those reported in the fi rst part of this book. It is now time to see them in action.
