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Simulating Societies

Posted by michael on from the playing-by-the-rules dept.

blamanj writes "Most of us were exposed fairly early to Conway's game of Life. A few simple rules produce a fascinating variety of behavior. Now, it appears that similar simulations can predict the behavior of populations and human societies."

7 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. One word by nagora · · Score: 4, Funny

    Psychohistory!

    --
    "Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
    1. Re:One word by Seska · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yeah, It's all fun and games until the Mule shows up.

  2. Once again Pr1me history.. by popeydotcom · · Score: 3, Funny

    I had to write a "Life" program for the Pr1me as part of a college project years ago. It was ok when run on a VDU, but some fool ran it on a teletype... one box of paper later.. it was turned off.

  3. So what? by SkyLeach · · Score: 3, Funny

    Preachers (albeit self-inflated ones), Theologians, Prophets and madmen have been doing that for years, albeit with little success.

    The primary problem is that the raw data cannot predict the movement of society, so therefor conjecture must be used. The conjecture is based on a hypothesis which is based on one of the obove basic viewpoints: religion vs. lack-thereof, pessimissm vs. optimism and basic intelligence of the average human vs. lack-thereof.

    Unless the person who writes the simulation is a prophet or exceptionally gifted, the software will be as flawed as any other model.

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    My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so :-p
  4. Hari Seldon by skankbot · · Score: 3, Funny

    The "Foundation" series by Issac Azimov never really seemed too far fetched to me. The ability of dedicated mathematicians to predict the course of large enough groups of human beings seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable, given enough variables and a population size that minimizes the chance for really unique/aberant behaviours. Now we have the computing power to back it all up.

    For those of you who will counter that I'm neglecting the point of the Second Foundation manipulating things... don't spoil it for me. Seldon still had to get at least the first several decades right you know.

  5. The game of life by phoenix_orb · · Score: 2, Funny

    Damn, when I read the header, I really thought we were all talking about The Game of Life

    Was I the only one who thought that?

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    Blah Blah Blah.
  6. Let's make this into a REAL game... by Vingborg · · Score: 2, Funny

    We could play "The World" in real-time on a huge, distributed network of some kind, something like a mix of E-Bay, Everquest and IRC only much, much greater. Add some CNN Online for thrills and feed /. streams at random. Something like that. Make it browserbased.

    We could "simulate" all sorts of events, you know, terrorist attacks, meteor impacts or natural disasters. Anything. The winners would sweep the stakes according to some sort of victory resolution scheme. Maybe THAT could be coded in Perl.

    All players could "initiate" actions at any time that would, eventually, over many turns, determine the final outcome. Players could interact with one another according to some proximity scheme. Players could coorperate toward common goals.

    At intervals we could make tournaments, where the winners of the local series would compete in the World Series. The World Champion would collect a huge prize and maybe move into The White House.

    Hmmm. I think I'll go to the pub...

    --
    For the sufficiently clueless, even trivial applications of common sense are indistinguishable from wisdom