Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up

Abstract

Part I Introduction: Artificial Society models life and death on the sugarscape sex, culture and conflict - the emergence of history sugar and spice - trade comes to the sugarscape disease agents a society is born artificial societies versus traditional models artificial societies versus a life toward generative social science - can you grow it?. Part II Life and death on the sugarscape: in the beginning - there was sugar the agents artificial society on the sugarscape wealth and its distribution in the agent population social networks of neighbours migration summary. Part III Sex, culture and conflict - the emergence of history: sexual reproduction cultural processes combat the proto-history. Part IV Sugar and spice - trade comes to the sugarscape: spice - a second commodity trade rules markets of bilateral traders emergent economic networks social computation, emergent computation summary and conclusions. Part V Disease processes: models of disease transmission and immune response immune system response disease transmission digital diseases on the sugarscape disease transmission networks. Part VI Conclusions: summary some extensions of the current model other artificial societies formal analysis of artificial societies generative social science looking ahead. Appendices: software engineering aspects of artificial societies summary of rule notation state-dependence on the welfare function.