Monday, September 13, 2004
Growing Artificial Societies: social science from the Bottom Up
Robert Axtell andJoshua Epstein
From : http://www.brook.edu/press/books/artifsoc.htm
How do social structures and group behaviors arise from the interaction of individuals? In this groundbreaking study, Joshua M. Epstein and Robert L. Axtell approach this age-old question with cutting-edge computer simulation techniques. Such fundamental collective behaviors as group formation, cultural transmission, combat, and trade are seen to "emerge" from the interaction of individual agents following simple local rules.
In their computer model, Epstein and Axtell begin the development of a "bottom up" social science. Their program, named Sugarscape, simulates the behavior of artificial people (agents) located on a landscape of a generalized resource (sugar). Agents are born onto the Sugarscape with a vision, a metabolism, a speed, and other genetic attributes. Their movement is governed by a simple local rule: "look around as far as you can; find the spot with the most sugar; go there and eat the sugar." Every time an agent moves, it burns sugar at an amount equal to its metabolic rate. Agents die if and when they burn up all their sugar. A remarkable range of social phenomena emerge. For example, when seasons are introduced, migration and hibernation can be observed. Agents are accumulating sugar at all times, so there is always a distribution of wealth.
Next, Epstein and Axtell attempt to grow a "proto-history" of civilization. It starts with agents scattered about a twin-peaked landscape; over time, there is self-organization into spatially segregated and culturally distinct "tribes" centered on the peaks of the Sugarscape. Population growth forces each tribe to disperse into the sugar lowlands between the mountains. There, the two tribes interact, engaging in combat and competing for cultural dominance, to produce complex social histories with violent expansionist phases, peaceful periods, and so on. The proto-history combines a number of ingredients, each of which generates insights of its own. One of these ingredients is sexual reproduction. In some runs, the population becomes thin, birth rates fall, and the population can crash. Alternatively, the agents may over-populate their environment, driving it into ecological collapse.
When Epstein and Axtell introduce a second resource (spice) to the Sugarscape and allow the agents to trade, an economic market emerges. The introduction of pollution resulting from resource-mining permits the study of economic markets in the presence of environmental factors.
Growing Artificial Societies is also available in CD-ROM format which includes about fifty animations that develop the scenarios described in the text.
This study is part of the 2050 Project, a joint venture of the Santa Fe Institute, the World Resources Institute, and the Brookings Institution. The project is an international effort to identify conditions for a sustainable global system in the middle of the next century and to design policy actions to help achieve such a system.
Robert L. Axtell is a research associate in the Brookings Foreign Policy Studies program. They are both members of the Santa Fe Institute. Joshua M. Epstein is senior fellow in the Brookings Foreign Policy Studies program and teaches at Princeton University. He is author of Strategy and Force Planning: The Case of the Persian Gulf (1987). The Calculus of Conventional War (1985), and The 1987 Defense Budget and The 1988 Defense Budget.
From : http://www.brook.edu/press/books/artifsoc.htm
How do social structures and group behaviors arise from the interaction of individuals? In this groundbreaking study, Joshua M. Epstein and Robert L. Axtell approach this age-old question with cutting-edge computer simulation techniques. Such fundamental collective behaviors as group formation, cultural transmission, combat, and trade are seen to "emerge" from the interaction of individual agents following simple local rules.
In their computer model, Epstein and Axtell begin the development of a "bottom up" social science. Their program, named Sugarscape, simulates the behavior of artificial people (agents) located on a landscape of a generalized resource (sugar). Agents are born onto the Sugarscape with a vision, a metabolism, a speed, and other genetic attributes. Their movement is governed by a simple local rule: "look around as far as you can; find the spot with the most sugar; go there and eat the sugar." Every time an agent moves, it burns sugar at an amount equal to its metabolic rate. Agents die if and when they burn up all their sugar. A remarkable range of social phenomena emerge. For example, when seasons are introduced, migration and hibernation can be observed. Agents are accumulating sugar at all times, so there is always a distribution of wealth.
Next, Epstein and Axtell attempt to grow a "proto-history" of civilization. It starts with agents scattered about a twin-peaked landscape; over time, there is self-organization into spatially segregated and culturally distinct "tribes" centered on the peaks of the Sugarscape. Population growth forces each tribe to disperse into the sugar lowlands between the mountains. There, the two tribes interact, engaging in combat and competing for cultural dominance, to produce complex social histories with violent expansionist phases, peaceful periods, and so on. The proto-history combines a number of ingredients, each of which generates insights of its own. One of these ingredients is sexual reproduction. In some runs, the population becomes thin, birth rates fall, and the population can crash. Alternatively, the agents may over-populate their environment, driving it into ecological collapse.
When Epstein and Axtell introduce a second resource (spice) to the Sugarscape and allow the agents to trade, an economic market emerges. The introduction of pollution resulting from resource-mining permits the study of economic markets in the presence of environmental factors.
Growing Artificial Societies is also available in CD-ROM format which includes about fifty animations that develop the scenarios described in the text.
This study is part of the 2050 Project, a joint venture of the Santa Fe Institute, the World Resources Institute, and the Brookings Institution. The project is an international effort to identify conditions for a sustainable global system in the middle of the next century and to design policy actions to help achieve such a system.
Robert L. Axtell is a research associate in the Brookings Foreign Policy Studies program. They are both members of the Santa Fe Institute. Joshua M. Epstein is senior fellow in the Brookings Foreign Policy Studies program and teaches at Princeton University. He is author of Strategy and Force Planning: The Case of the Persian Gulf (1987). The Calculus of Conventional War (1985), and The 1987 Defense Budget and The 1988 Defense Budget.
Friday, August 27, 2004
Networks and Netwars: the future of Terror,Crime and Militancy
John Arquila and David Ronfeldt (editors)
Rand Corporation
Arquila and Ronfeldt were the first to coin the term "netwar", and to explore a non-hierarchized, decentralized mode of combat.
This book is a collection of essays by various authors around this concept.
Extract from the book's summary :
Netwar is the lower-intensity, societal-level counterpart to our earlier,
mostly military concept of cyberwar. Netwar has a dual nature, like
the two-faced Roman god Janus, in that it is composed of conflicts
waged, on the one hand, by terrorists, criminals, and ethnonationalist
extremists; and by civil-society activists on the other. What distinguishes
netwar as a form of conflict is the networked organizational
structure of its practitioners—with many groups actually being leaderless
—and the suppleness in their ability to come together quickly in
swarming attacks. The concepts of cyberwar and netwar encompass a
new spectrum of conflict that is emerging in the wake of the information
revolution.
This volume studies major instances of netwar that have occurred
over the past several years and finds, among other things, that netwar
works very well. Whether the protagonists are civil-society activists or
"uncivil-society" criminals and terrorists, their netwars have generally
been successful. In part, the success of netwar may be explained by
its very novelty—much as earlier periods of innovation in military affairs
have seen new practices triumphant until an appropriate response
is discovered. But there is more at work here: The network
form of organization has reenlivened old forms of licit and illicit activity,
posing serious challenges to those—mainly the militaries, constabularies,
and governing officials of nation states—whose duty is to
cope with the threats this new generation of largely nonstate actors
poses."
This book, like all the publications of Rand Corporation, may be read online for free at :
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1382/
Rand Corporation
Arquila and Ronfeldt were the first to coin the term "netwar", and to explore a non-hierarchized, decentralized mode of combat.
This book is a collection of essays by various authors around this concept.
Extract from the book's summary :
Netwar is the lower-intensity, societal-level counterpart to our earlier,
mostly military concept of cyberwar. Netwar has a dual nature, like
the two-faced Roman god Janus, in that it is composed of conflicts
waged, on the one hand, by terrorists, criminals, and ethnonationalist
extremists; and by civil-society activists on the other. What distinguishes
netwar as a form of conflict is the networked organizational
structure of its practitioners—with many groups actually being leaderless
—and the suppleness in their ability to come together quickly in
swarming attacks. The concepts of cyberwar and netwar encompass a
new spectrum of conflict that is emerging in the wake of the information
revolution.
This volume studies major instances of netwar that have occurred
over the past several years and finds, among other things, that netwar
works very well. Whether the protagonists are civil-society activists or
"uncivil-society" criminals and terrorists, their netwars have generally
been successful. In part, the success of netwar may be explained by
its very novelty—much as earlier periods of innovation in military affairs
have seen new practices triumphant until an appropriate response
is discovered. But there is more at work here: The network
form of organization has reenlivened old forms of licit and illicit activity,
posing serious challenges to those—mainly the militaries, constabularies,
and governing officials of nation states—whose duty is to
cope with the threats this new generation of largely nonstate actors
poses."
This book, like all the publications of Rand Corporation, may be read online for free at :
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1382/
Monday, June 21, 2004
Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds
Mitchell Resnick
Bradford books
The main characteristic of the peer to peer system is that nobody, or nothing is in charge to supervise the organization of the exchange occurring in the system. Any high level structure is therfore not decided in the beginning by a god-like creator, but is the product, the emergence, of the interaction between the various elements.
In fact, almost any complex phenomenon occurring in the natural world (including human societies) is the result of the interaction of simpler, equivalent, elements. The main problem, for us, human, is that our brain is not wired to understand plainly such phenomena. We need to imagine a boss a god, a center... That’s why the behavior of anthill of termites’ colonies continue to present for us an almost miraculous, magical aspect.
That’s why we have so much difficulties to master phenomena such as traffic jams, economical fluctuations, urban guerrillas and riots. That’s why also it’s so hard to design a peer to peer organization: by definition, it’s impossible to tell the various members of the system the way they should behave.
The understanding of these decentralized, “bottom-up” systems (to use Chris Langton’s words), are critical to understand a wide range of phenomena, from the predator-prey relationship in a forest to the way to organize a successful party. it’s therefore obvious that the lack of appropriate conceptual tools will greatly impair our action in the world.
This is where Mitchell Resnick his coming. Resnick is the inventor of a new programming language, named “starlogo”. The goal of starlogo is to develop the intuition about decentralized systems. In other words, starlogo is not a programming language like Cobol, C or even Lisp. Its goal is not to produce applications, but to help the user to broaden his conceptual horizon. Starlogo is above all an educational tool, and it is sufficiently simple and friendly to be learnt by children.
“Turtles, termites and traffic jams” was written in 1994. This is the fist exposion of starlogo, at a time where this language could only run on very powerful computers. Today, it is available for free and run on any computer having a Java virtual machine.
“turtles, termites and traffic jams” is a new kind of book; half philoophy and science, half programming manual. Here you don’t have just to read about new and exciting ideas: you can do them, play with them.
starlogo is an invluable tool for any people who wants to understand the working of emergent, collective systems,
One can download a java version of starlogo at :
http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/
there is also a variant of starlogo, netlogo, here:
http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
NB: both java starlogo and Netlogo present substancial difference with the original Starlogo presented in the book.
Bradford books
The main characteristic of the peer to peer system is that nobody, or nothing is in charge to supervise the organization of the exchange occurring in the system. Any high level structure is therfore not decided in the beginning by a god-like creator, but is the product, the emergence, of the interaction between the various elements.
In fact, almost any complex phenomenon occurring in the natural world (including human societies) is the result of the interaction of simpler, equivalent, elements. The main problem, for us, human, is that our brain is not wired to understand plainly such phenomena. We need to imagine a boss a god, a center... That’s why the behavior of anthill of termites’ colonies continue to present for us an almost miraculous, magical aspect.
That’s why we have so much difficulties to master phenomena such as traffic jams, economical fluctuations, urban guerrillas and riots. That’s why also it’s so hard to design a peer to peer organization: by definition, it’s impossible to tell the various members of the system the way they should behave.
The understanding of these decentralized, “bottom-up” systems (to use Chris Langton’s words), are critical to understand a wide range of phenomena, from the predator-prey relationship in a forest to the way to organize a successful party. it’s therefore obvious that the lack of appropriate conceptual tools will greatly impair our action in the world.
This is where Mitchell Resnick his coming. Resnick is the inventor of a new programming language, named “starlogo”. The goal of starlogo is to develop the intuition about decentralized systems. In other words, starlogo is not a programming language like Cobol, C or even Lisp. Its goal is not to produce applications, but to help the user to broaden his conceptual horizon. Starlogo is above all an educational tool, and it is sufficiently simple and friendly to be learnt by children.
“Turtles, termites and traffic jams” was written in 1994. This is the fist exposion of starlogo, at a time where this language could only run on very powerful computers. Today, it is available for free and run on any computer having a Java virtual machine.
“turtles, termites and traffic jams” is a new kind of book; half philoophy and science, half programming manual. Here you don’t have just to read about new and exciting ideas: you can do them, play with them.
starlogo is an invluable tool for any people who wants to understand the working of emergent, collective systems,
One can download a java version of starlogo at :
http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/
there is also a variant of starlogo, netlogo, here:
http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
NB: both java starlogo and Netlogo present substancial difference with the original Starlogo presented in the book.
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
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