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

Multiagent Systems

[mellifluous]

This article is really describing modeling using multiagent systems. Though very simple multiagent systems may resemble cellular automata (such as Conway's Life), they are not the same thing. Though they have been described in very convenient graphical representations using grids in the article, agents can model more complex behavior and need not be determinisitic (i.e. they may have a random element).

Another way to look at it is that cellular automata like Life use a single deterministic rule to govern the whole system. Agent-based systems, on the other hand, model goal-oriented behavior of the individual objects.

Again, Conway's game can be viewed as a very special case of an simple agent system, but the spirit of what is being done with agent systems is typically more involved. Comparing these systems to Conway's game of Life may create an incorrect impression for those not familiar with agent programming.

Uh... Police State?

[Aix]

The corruption/honesty simulation is very interesting, and they make a big deal about how everyone "turns blue" at the end, in other words, the whole society turns honest. The problem is that, if you look, there is a band of red dots right above the blue ones, which means that there were a huge number of "arrests" right before everyone "became honest." I don't know about you, but that sounds a lot like communism or the Taliban or Pat Robertson, or any number of other totalitarian situations. "If we just threaten to throw everyone in jail, everyone will become honest!"

Hmmm... So the simulation is accurate, but I would hypothesize that it does not show that a free society will trend towards "honesty."

Re:Hari Seldon

[sphealey]

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.

Lack of computing power hasn't been a problem for a long time - I wrote simulations like this on a VAX in the early 80's.

The problems lie elsewhere. Two that come to mind quickly are (1) lack of agreed upon factual data to use as the basis of the hypotheses. Do people with green skin have more or fewer babies out of wedlock than people with orange skin, and has this number increased or decreased over the last 10 years? Even in the US, with the Census data and tremendous amounts of market research, there are no agreed-upon answers to fundamental questions of data. Plenty of Newtons but no Kepler.

(2) None of these models are reversible. Put in a starting point of today's conditions, set the time increment to -1, and run the simulation backwards for 100 years. What comes out will be nothing like the world as it actually was in 1900. If we can't accuratly predict what happened in the past, how can we have any belief that the models tell us anything meaningful about the future?

sPh