Slashdot Mirror
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."
Psychohistory!
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
A couple more samples...
Music created using the game of life
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.
If you're into this stuff, this link is cool.
I predict that it your screensaver is Life, you'll get no work done.
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.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
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.
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
Hmmm... So the simulation is accurate, but I would hypothesize that it does not show that a free society will trend towards "honesty."
Nonperiodic Central Trajectory
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.
One thing that I've found interesting is how closely *any* group can be predicted -- this from the three or four required sociology courses in college. Many of use here pride ourselves on having different values than the mainstream population. However, the behaviour of the niche groups can be eerily predicted by statistical models to the point that it's now a business tool and not just cool science. So we may not be able to predict that an individual is a devoted Bob Dylan fan, but they can probably see upswings in folk music and tie dyes whenever a war is brewing in the (insert region here).
--
Everybody must get stoned.
Other large scale societal modeling took place with The Club of Rome's Limits to Growth -- It used the SIMULA simulation language to investigate such questions as population growth, resource usage, environmental degradation and capital investment as co-related variables. They came to some very interesting (and even disturbing) conclusions.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Ref. the first post: Hari Seldon's (OK, Isaac Asimov's) theory of Psychohistory has as it's base theorem that the behavior of individual humans is unpredictable, but the behavior of large groups of humans is predictable to within statistical limits. And if you think he's wrong, ask about marketing profiles and even Amazon's recommendations system.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345335635
It is quite a good story, actually.
Amazon Pebble in the sky has it on limited avalibilaty
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
Unfortunately for people who maintain that man is ineffable and that God is unknowable, the facts are that man is statistically predictable, easily manipulatable and, while he is imbued with a lab animal's right to do whatever he damn well chooses in a carefully controlled experiment, he rarely does so he is reducible to a mathematical theorem.
As for God, when he calls you on the phone, tells you where Bin Laden's hiding and what the results of tomorrow's lotto pick, then you can publish a paper on his existence. Until then, less God and more functioning brain cells, please.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Hari Seldon's (OK, Isaac Asimov's) theory of Psychohistory has as it's base theorem that the behavior of individual humans is unpredictable, but the behavior of large groups of humans is predictable to within statistical limits
Another example of this is the information life insurance adjusters use. They can tell you with striking precision how many 30 year old males will die in a year out of 100,000. They just can't tell you which ones it will be.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
For those who don't get subtil things (or just happened to miss this one)
When you perdict something people tend to act on the perdiction. Thus God sent a profit to warn Niniva of coming doom, but the people repented and so God no longer needed to send that doom. So does the fact that the people lived (for 100 years before some other country invaded) mean that God doesn't exist, or that repenting will save your life?
If everyone knew the terrorist were going to fly a plane into the world trade center in september nobody would have been there. (other than press, and some engineers to study the situation). If the terrorist knew they were discovered like that odds are they would call the whole thing off, and everyone would then laugh at those who gave a warning about something that never happened.
2000 is a perfect example. There were big comptuer problems related to the roll over from 1999 to 2000, but because there was warning the problems were fixed, so there were no problems, so the warnings must have been uneeded right?
There are many more examples that can be thought of. The point is clear though: warnings are a double edged sword.
However I'm willing to perdict the next terrorist bombing will be in Iseral/Palistine. You are now warned. (too bad I can't be more specific, this will do you little good if you live in that area)
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?
Blah Blah Blah.
It's not just that the simulations use
simple rules, but we humans use simple rules
too because we are simple minded and are usually
driven by simple heuristics. It's not suprising
that the simulated behaviour closely matches
real behaviour. Fot it to be otherwise would
take a level of intelligence we don't seem
to have.
For those who don't get subtil things (or just happened to miss this one)
Subtle.
When you perdict something people tend to act on the perdiction. Thus God sent a profit to warn Niniva of coming doom,
Predict. Prediction. Prophet. Nineveh.
2000 is a perfect example. There were big comptuer problems related to the roll over from 1999 to 2000, but because there
Computer. Rollover.
was warning the problems were fixed, so there were no problems, so the warnings must have been uneeded right?
Unneeded.
However I'm willing to perdict the next terrorist bombing will be in Iseral/Palistine. You are now warned.
Predict. Israel. Palestine.
Your score is 11. Your rating is JeffK. Thank you for playing!
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Here is a paper (by the same author) on the simulation of the evolution of communication based on kin structure under the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Seastead this.
I'm pretty sure I had a version of this simulator on my Commodote 64 back in the mid 1980s. Of course, with a 320x200 grid and a 1MHz processor, it took many hours for the segregation to be complete. I remember being fascinated by it.
The major problems with the models is that they are not very good at handling technological change that in turn makes fundamental changes in the values the models use to make its predictions.
For example, let's say your population growth model includes a value for "food value produced per acre of land". If something comes along that allows more food to be produced per acre, then that'll skew the models to hell.
This actually happened. A new strain of wheat (?) was produced a few years ago that was able to survive in much tougher conditions, and that single-handedly staved off starvation in India.
The same with waste levels. recycling has become much more prevelent, and modern cars are so much better that they're actually starting to _clean_ the air that passes through them.
The models were accurate the day they were published, but the run conditions have changed since.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
From what the article describes, the people doing these experiments have got their research backwatds. Specficially finding that a particular set of assumptions to a simulation generates a result 'like' human society is meaningless unless you also show that the assumptions are legitimate. The racism example was particularly egregious; nowhere is it explained why ignoring the effect of income distribution, access to jobs, the actions of the government, etc on where people lived was valid. It gives the strong impression that showing that racial division arises from inscrutable preferences is attractive for political reasons more than anything.
The article reminded me of the old story of the experimentall physicist who runs excitedly up to his theorist colleague, exclaiming "Look! I can show that A > B!" The theorist says, "That's easy to explain. [Explanation deleted...]" The experimentalist says, "Did I say A > B? I meant B > A.", to which the theorist replies, "Oh, that's even easier to explain."
The models described seem far too simple to describe something as complicated as society. As a physicist who has dabbled in biology, I know the perils of applying simple models to biological systems. How sensitive are these models to the addition of another type of interaction between people, or another outside influence? For every simple model that shows A>B, I can come up with one that shows B>A, unless the simple model is very well rooted in fhe fundamental physics (or sociology) of the problem. I don't believe that the fundamentals of sociology are well enough established to make these models believable.
For example, consider the Schelling model of segregation discussed in the article. From a physicist's point of view, this is a statisictal simulation of a system of two types of particles on a lattice, with an attractive interaction between particles of the same type. There's no temperature, so the system will phase separate, since that's the lowest energy state. No surprise there. A five minute chat with a physicist could have saved Schelling a lot of computer time. The more interesting question is what happens when you add some randomness in the form of temperature. Then the system will phase separate below a certain temperature, and form a single mixed phase above that temperature. What is the sociological analog of temperature? (Ok, I know that one... If a particle of one type is hot for a particle of another type, then you get particles of mixed type....)
The simulations are cute and I'm sure they're fun to play with, but I wouldn't put much stock in them.
-- Steve
Lost: one sig, witty, 120 chars, sentimental value. Reward offered.
Which is an interesting result. It suggests that this is the key thing for society to concentrate on in order to prevent disaster.
Of course you don't want to embark on such a course based purely on Limits to Growth, but the value of such simulations is that they tell you where the hidden levers are, even if they can't give precise predictions about what happens when you pull them.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
The program that ended up as the most successful was also the simplest. University of Toronto Game Theorist Anatol Rappaport had submitted a program he called tit for tat. Tit for tat initially cooperated with all the other players. In subsequent turns if the other player it was interacting with had defected last turn, it defected this turn. If the other player had cooperated last turn it cooperated this turn.
Yes, the interactions between people are very complicated, and this game is very simple. Still food for thought though.
For those interested in the subject of simulating artifical societies in silico i strongly recommend:
(Sorry, i'm against linking to online book stores)
Growing Artificial Societies - Social Science from the Bottom Up
Joshua M. Epstein & Robert Axtell
ISBN 0-262-55025-3
So are there twice as many trolls as offtopics, 10 times as many trolls as insightful posts, and so on?
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
First, the book is full of examples, but nowhere to Epstein and Axtell give you enough information to actually reproduce their results (a classic mark of shady science).
Second, there are parts of the book where they draw conclusions from things that are obviously simulation artifacts (ie. if you change the grid size, these effects disappear or are mitigated severely).
Did I mention their lack of understanding of basic computer science issues? (Their formal training is in the social sciences).
For a pair of scholars at the esteemed Brookings Institute, you would would expect more. Unfortunately, you wouldn't get it.
Don't buy their book.
But that then changes the whole psychohistory bent and Foundation away from predicting the future, and instead takes it into controlling the future. It kinda makes one wonder how much 'nudging' the second Foundation had been doing up to the point where the Mule showed up.
Hmm... and I guess that changes Harry Seldon from a visionary into a Despot. Well, at least he was a benevolent one.
Used on amazon from $2.00..
3 5 [amazon.com]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/03453356
It is quite a good story, actually.
Right now the Writers of America are boycotting Amazon. Every time you buy a used book from them the author gets nothing, nada, not a cent.
They are the pirates of our generation, the RIAA of the MP3 world.
As with music, where you should buy the CD from the musicians instead of thru RIAA (hint - they make $5 for a $6 CD they sell in person, and $0.02 for a $15 CD you buy thru RIAA) - for books you should buy from the author (e.g. printed book). they get no money for their work when you buy it used.
Note that libraries do kick back to authors - and in Canada and the EU they kick back a big chunk of change. So please check it out at the library before you buy it used from Amazon.
[note - I'm biased, I've sold stories myself]
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
A model pictures reality by simplifying it. This research is emulation.... The problem is that everyone KNOWS the outcomes. The IMPORTANT question is whether the underlying assumptions catch the true causal forces.
And there are real problems with this school of thought, not the least of which is its claim that getting complex interactions out of simple assumptions is any harder than getting complex interactions out of a great deal of assumptions. It should be self-evident that complexity in this type of research stems largely from the number of actors, not the determinants of their behavior.
Deeper problems include assumptions of rationality and intentionality on the part of actors. There is also a tendency towards selection bias and selectivity THAT IS NEVER ADDRESSED. IE, this author may think he explains ethnic genocide in Rwanda, but never points out that his logic fails miserable in places like Switzerland, Brazil, Mexico, Russia and much of the Middle-East, where his model would predict much MORE conflict than we see.
The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). It is on-line. It is free. It is great.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Agreed, though I would argue that it's the complexity and the heterogeneity of human decision making rules that make them more difficult to predict, rather than their ability to reason per se.
Rationality isn't really an issue - it can be considered just another decision rule that can be formulated pretty much as "do whatever is in my best interest" where best interest is defined to include the value gained (if any?!?) from helping others, altruism etc.
Many experts in the field of rationality and choice theory would of course argue that humans are not fully rational and frequently make decisions not ultimately in their own interests. People are for example generally bad at making tradeoffs between short and long term goals, and also at evaluating risks.
This shouldn't be taken as an argument for paternalism, but rather that the ability of an individual to calculate the outcomes of their decisions is not good enough to calculate the best decision in a limited time with imperfect information.
Basically humans seem to operate on the level of "bounded rationality" where they operate according to fairly simple "rules of thumb" and only deviate from these when they experience or anticipate a significant positive or negative outcome that encourages them to think more carefully about the issue. After which, of course, they devise a slightly more sophisticated rule of thumb and continue as before.....
People trading stocks for profit is a subset of society. No one has been able to predict market futures accurately. Ask Long Term Capital, the hedge firm full of Nobel economists, that almost took out the world economy four years ago.
The problem is that once someone figures out some new profitable information about the market, it works for a while until enough people figure out the same method. Then it becomes useless.
I expect prediction of society as a whole to fail for the same reason. When people learn what is being predicted, they'll do sometime new and unpredictable.
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
Check out this cellular automaton which I made which makes some cool graphics:
www.geocities.com/enriqueeder/trip.html
Each pixel is a cell in the automaton. Each cell has 3 quantities each of which has a value between 0 and 255. The quantities correspond to the amount of red, green and blue in the color of the cell.
The color of each cell in the next frame of the simulation depends on its current color and the color of its neighbors in the current frame. The rule is that each quantity (red, green and blue) has an enemy or inhibitor quantity. For example green is by default the enemy of red, so the more green a cell's neighbors have in the current frame, the less red that cell will have in the next frame. Red is also the enemy of blue, and blue is the enemy of green. So each quantity has an enemy.
The simulation is seeded with a randomly colored cell by clicking on the black screen. To run the simulation, click the Go button. To stop it, click the Stop button. To advance just one frame click the Step button.
If you click the Design button, a window will pop up where you can modify the parameters of the calculation. The Neighbors amount determines how much the amount of the enemy quantity in a cell's neighbors affects that cell in the next frame. The Self amount determines how much the cell stays true to its current color. The Enemy amount affects how much one quantity is affected by its enemy quantity. The Direction button flips the quantities' enemies.
The unexpected result is trippy swirling patterns as red chases green, green chases blue and blue chases red.
The findings also suggest that the world is *not* headed where your manifesto says it is. Even if there is a small elite "intelligentsia" that desires to control everything through such tools as polical correctness and global capitalism, societies appear to be complex and unpredictable enough that they won't succeed.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I would like to see simulations of the slashdot community's overall response to moderation, membership fees, advertising, etc. Also, simulations of diverse markets of computer users in selecting operating systems would be interesting. Will answer questions like "will MS rule the world?", "are all the Linux companies doomed?", "is Steve Jobs insane?", and of course, "is BSD dying?"
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
sPh
/.
A fatal flaw of this simulation (as a model of real society, that is) is that it includes the "Cincinatus" characters - the incorruptible agents - but does not include the "Dillingers" - agents who are not deterred by punishment, of themselves or of others.
I have found over the years that people who are not influenced by "common sense" (or even an informed sense of self-preservation) are much more common than incorruptible people. Luckily (perhaps) these people more commonly are obsessed with greed than killing, or we'd have a lot more mayhem and a few less rich people.
Thus, the simultation should include agents that are not influenced by the arrest rate, and the model will probably become cyclic instead of trending to a fixed equilibrium.
Your statement that "the simulation is accurate" is unfounded, as any serious study of real behaviour in a police state will show. The Chinese shoot homosexuals and drug addicts; yet they still occur just as frequently as in other nations with less draconian laws. The US is "soft on crime" according to the Immoral Minority, yet our crime rates continue to drop.
But of course, anyone who thinks humans are simple agents with simple motivations is very unobservant.
--Charlie
CS nerds might be in a good position to end the recession. We know how to do big simulations and distributed computing and how to mine for data to feed a simulation. We know how to run several simulations in parallel, each representing a different course of economic intervention.
The economy is driven primarily by human actions and decisions. In principle, humans could all agree that recessions are bad, and each tweak our behavior to end the damn thing. Given how much suffering the economy can cause, it seems ridiculous to leave it entirely to chance.
It may turn out that benign interventions are impossible because of conflicts of interest (an individual's own interests dictate behavior that prolongs the recession or injures society, what the economics folks call a tragedy of the commons). But it might at least merit investigation.
My own small effort in this direction appears in my sig.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
This story should have been from the hari seldon dept.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Lots to read here.
Or maybe you'd prefer some free and legal MP3s.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
The biggest thing that it fails to model is that *virtually each and every one of those red dots that has been arrested is the son, daughter, parent, friend, brother, or sister* of some of those blue dots. There's a lot of complicated things that happen when a family member gets caught in the legal system, but often one of the things that happens is *not* increased law-abiding activity.
Depends on the model. In stock markets, we have self-defeating prophecies; if everybody knows a stock is going up, it's too late, it's already up. In other situations you may have self-fullfilling prophecies - 'There's going to be a war at some point, we know it, they know it, so we better attack first.'
The trick is knowing which is which...
Black and White was a high-resolution multiplayer version of a Tamagotchi.
Dyolf Knip
They're quite relevant, it's just that the logical results from those factors were already included in. Poor income distribution, job access, and government actions are all among the factors that can lead to racism. The simulation started with the assumption that racism existed, so assuming the factors that lead to it is unneccesary.
What would be interesting is to run a detailed sim where racism is not assumed, but the factors we think lead to it are.
Dyolf Knip
The word "chaordic" is used as defined by Dee Hock (the person behind VISA) at http://www.chaordic.org and in his book "Birth of the Chaordic Age", which is essentially processes at the boundary between CHAos and ORDer and the social implications for how to design effective and responsive organizations for a dynamic society. The focus will be specially on computer simulations to support part of the goal defined here http://www.chaordic.org/who_hist.html#FourCond of: "Development of visual and physical models of chaordic organizations so that people have something to examine, experiment with, and compare to existing organizations. The models must contain the ethical and spiritual dimensions generally lacking in current models. In addition, computer simulations will need to be created to allow people to quickly see how clarity of purpose and principles allow institutions to self-organize, evolve over decades, and link in new patterns for an enduring constructive society."
People are invited to join the mailing list if they want at this page http://mail.freesoftware.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/ simulchaord-discuss
if you want to contribute to project related discussions or submit
snippets of code (with the understanding contributions will be archived
and can be incorporated into the project under the GPL license). I have been posting some artificial life links there related to modelling social systems to get things started -- one of the first was a link to the Atlantic Monthly article discussed in this Slashdot thread. For now, I am using
use the list to record my own musings on related simulation issues
including design, architecture, and use cases. I will also be posting my experiences as I try to create such simulations. Feel free to lurk for a while or chime in.
Here is a page leading to the entire mailing list archives (aroudn twenty messages so far): http://mail.freesoftware.fsf.org/pipermail/simulch aord-discuss/
The main project page is here: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/simulchaord/ Cooperative development of releases of code is hosted on Savannah using CVS although I haven't yet put up any content (files or homepage) besides what's archived in the mailing list.
At the moment I am looking at using Swarm http://www.swarm.org as the base -- although I may just use Python instead -- or even use both for different aspects.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I'm not really sure what you meant by the grid-size comment, since of course results are dependent on this.)
Really? Then what possible use are the results? The article talks a lot about a simulation that suggests that segregation is not due to racism but to simple emergent properties. If it turns out that this is a simple artifact due to the grid size, then the results are worse then useless -- they are actually harmful.
I post a detailed technical critique of the original research about which the article is written, conducted by the scientist about which the article is written, and someone downrates my post as "Offtopic".
This gives you a clue as to what the problem is to which I referred in my critique.
Seastead this.