SugarScape

1
(No Transcript)
2
SugarScape

• By Mitch Quinn
• Email mitchquinn_at_sympatico.ca

3
Outline

• Introduction
• Life and Death on the SugarScape
• Sex, Culture and Conflict
• Sugar and Spice
• Disease Processes
• Conclusions

4
Introduction

• Growing Artificial Societies
• Social science from the bottom up.
• By Jushua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell

• A product of the 2050 Project, a collaborative
  effort of the Brookings Institution, The Santa Fe
  Institute, and the World Resources Institute.

5
Introduction

• Social sciences as the hard sciences
• The model transdiscipline from the emergent
  behaviour
• Started from Thomas Schellings efforts
• Agent-based models of social processes
  artificial Societies
• Emergent behaviours that reflect real life
  situations. Leads to better understanding of how
  one can influence society development in the
  future.

6
Introduction

• The experiments involve three basic ingredients
• Agents
• Environment
• Rules
• We grow the collective structures from the
  bottom up.
• More complications as we progress

7
What is Sugarscape ?

• Cellular Automata Agents Artificial Society
• The agent society and its spatial environment are
  coupled.

8
Life and Death on the Sugarscape

• Landscape
• Distribution over a grid of levels of sugar
• Agents - Ants
• Vision
• Metabolism
• Others characteristics smarter ants

9
Life and Death on the Sugarscape

• Carrying capacity
• Migration
• Distribution of Wealth
• CompuTerrarium
• Social Connection

10
Sex, Culture and Conflict The Emergence of
History

• Growing distinct populations
• A proto-history
• The story
• Correlation between known real life society and
  the artificial society.
• reverse-engineering to explain how we got to
  where we are now. Or explain what happened in
  the past in order to get us to today

11
Sex, culture and ConflictThe Emergence of
History

• The ingredients
• Sexual reproduction
• Tribe formation
• Combat

12
Sugar and SpiceTrade comes to the Sugarscape

• Sugar versus Spice
• Metabolism
• Preferences
• Trade
• Finite life
• Credit
• The welfare of the individual leads to the
  welfare of the whole.

13
Disease Processes

• Historical influence of disease
• Prohibition of pork and beef (Mad Cow)
• HIV, Black Death
• War and Conquest
• Adaptive agents spreading disease and influence
  of other social processes

14
ConclusionsA Society is born

• So now we have an artificial society which
  includes movement, resource gathering, sexual
  reproduction, combat, cultural transmission,
  trade, inheritance, credit, pollution, immune
  learning, and disease propagation. Quite a
  complex, multidimensional artificial society and
  is only the beginning

15
ConclusionsFurther Examination

• Other Traditional Models
• Homogeneous vs heterogeneous
• Spatial components
• Local vs global information
• Focus on Dynamics
• Beyond Methodological Individualism

16
THE Conclusion(s)

• The point of departure in agent-based modeling
  is the individual They give agents rules of
  behaviour and then spin the system forward in
  time and see what macroscopic social structures
  emerge and
• Methodological Individualism

17
Where to go from here?

• Can you grow it?
• More extensions
• Ring World
• Etc ? !
• Very useful and useable application
• An easy read, even for a sociology neophyte as
  myself.

18
Questions ??