Artificial Societies

Bleeding Edge

from the fascinating dept

A very long, but absolutely fascinating, read about researchers who are creating artificial societies to simulate how real societies act. I remember many years ago becoming fascinated with the concepts of artificial life programs – and these don’t seem to go much beyond those old programs. Yet, with some very simple looking programs (that aren’t that simple at all in reality), you can recreate all sorts of interesting findings about how societies respond to certain events or characteristics. It seems pretty obvious that this field is only beginning, and as more complicated artificial societies are created, we will learn more and more about how different societies are likely to respond to various events.