Simulating Societies

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."

Comments

Worked with these guys in college

[XDG]

I worked with Epstein and Axtell in college. The author's description of them is spot on, and they are both fantastic people.

If you found this article interesting, their book is a great exposition of their early work with emergent behaviors. You can find it at Amazon here:

Growing Artificial Societies

There is a similar article on complexity and emergent behavior in the latest Harvard Business Review.

-XDG

Re:A pebble in the sky

[fwc]

Used on amazon from $2.00..

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345335635

It is quite a good story, actually.

Re:Do not use your more recent data to set your mo

[sphealey]

If you use the data say 1970 - 1985 for building your model, you can use 1986 - 2002 as the 'future' you are trying to predict.

That might take care of the explict side (although I would argue that), but it does not address the subconscious bias of the modeler in creating the model - after all, we already know what happened during those time periods. Nor the problem of self-selection described by cyberon22 above.

sPh

Introspective Models

[gnovos]

The main problem with models like these is that they do not often take into account the dynamic nature of the "rules" that govern the simulated people. In the real world, people are able to change the rules that they live by, self-programming in a sense. For example, if we were to run a model that used the "rules" that governed race-relations in the 1800 and attempt to run that simulation forward to today, we would find that the end result is drastically different than the world we live in today, becuase the rules themlesves are evolving as the simulation moves forward. Maybe when simulating frog populations, this kind of rule-changing is less common, but when simulating people, it will always happen.

People have the ability to see the broader picture and alter the way the work in it. For example, in the scenario from the article where any particular square bases it's actions on the squares next to it, a "human" square would base it's rules on the squares next to it, BUT also on the makup of the board as a whole.

Once the simulators begin to allow the rules themselves to change, then we will see some really amazing results.