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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"
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.
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.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345335635
It is quite a good story, actually.
Problem is, the Club of Rome predicted that everyone in the Western world would either be starving to death or choked in their own waste by the far-off year 2000. Looking out my window today, I see that things are far from perfect, but we have a higher population, more food, and in many respects less pollution than we did in 1975. So the CoR's models were dead wrong.
sPh
But that's exactly what the corruption/honesty simulation is trying to argue against. It is saying that traditional social science modelling is fundamentally flawed because it assumes everyone in a particular group behaves the same and has unlimited knowledge.
A social model that viewed individuals as multiple copies of the same fully informed person could thus never "see" the social transformation that Hammond found, for the simple reason that without diversity and limited knowledge, the transformation never happens. Given that human beings are invariably diverse and that the knowledge at their disposal is invariably limited, it would seem to follow that even societies in which unsophisticated people obey rudimentary rules will produce surprises and discontinuities--events that cannot be foreseen either through intuition or through the more conventional sorts of social science.
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
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.
i've done this in other research, it checks out, it's pretty neat to calculate the length of posts/conversations etc, rank them and graph them, and see a zipf distribution pop out. anybody else out there doing this?
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.
Do you also support Disney's position that I should have to pay them a royalty every time I watch a DVD that I purchased? I won't buy DVDs or CDs or anything else under that plan, and I won't buy books under your plan. Period. If you want to kill your market, go right ahead -- there's pleanty of other entertainment sources that take a more reasonable view.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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
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!"