Artificial societies Artificial societies The computer simulation of social life Edited by Nigel Gilbert University of Surrey & Rosaria Conte Institute of Psychology Italian National Research Council © Nigel Gilbert, Rosaria Conte and contributors, 1995 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. First published in 1995 by UCL Press This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” UCL Press Limited University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT The name of University College London (UCL) is a registered trade mark used by UCL Press with the consent of the owner. ISBN 0-203-99369-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN: 1-85728-305-8 (Print Edition) HB British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Artificial societies: the computer simulation of social life/edited by Nigel Gilbert and Rosaria Conte. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-85728-305-8 1. Social sciences—Simulation methods—Congresses. 2. Computer simulation—Congresses. I. Gilbert, G.Nigel. II. Conte, Rosaria, 1952– H61.A7 1995 94–47440 300′.1′13–dc20 CIP Contents Preface vii Notes on contributors ix 1 Introduction: computer simulation for social theory 1 Rosaria Conte and Nigel Gilbert Part I The simulation of social theories 2 A model of the emergence of new political actors 15 Robert Axelrod 3 Division of labour and social co-ordination modes: a simple simulation 33 model Massimo Egidi and Luigi Marengo 4 Emergence of kinship structures: a multi-agent approach 48 Jean Pierre Treuil 5 Cities can be agents too: a model for the evolution of settlement systems 72 Stéphane Bura, France Guérin-Pace, Hélène Mathian, Denise Pumain and Lena Sanders 6 The EOS project: integrating two models of Palaeolithic social change 86 Jim Doran and Mike Palmer 7 Genetic algorithms, teleological conservatism, and the emergence of optimal 106 demand relations: the case of learning-by-consuming Roger McCain Part II The evolution and emergence of societies 8 Emergence in social simulation 122 Nigel Gilbert 9 How to invent a lexicon: the development of shared symbols in interaction 132 Edwin Hutchins and Brian Hazlehurst 10 MANTA: new experimental results on the emergence of (artificial) ant 160 societies Alexis Drogoul, Bruno Corbara, Steffen Lalande 11 Emergent behaviour in societies of heterogeneous, interacting agents: 180 alliances and norms alliances and norms Nicholas V.Findler and R.M.Malyankar Part III The foundations of social simulation 12 Kin-directed altruism and attachment behaviour in an evolving population of 201 neural networks Domenico Parisi, Federico Cecconi and Antonio Cerini 13 Understanding the functions of norms in social groups through simulation 213 Rosaria Conte and Cristiano Castelfranchi 14 A logical approach to simulating societies 227 Michael Fisher and Michael Wooldridge Bibliography 240 Index 252 Preface This volume draws on contributions made to the second of a continuing series of international symposia on “simulating societies”. All the chapters, except the one by Robert Axelrod, first saw the light of day at a meeting held in a converted monastery at Certosa di Pontignano, near Siena in Italy, in July 1993. Robert Axelrod was not able to be present, but contributed a chapter nevertheless. The meeting in Siena followed one held at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK, in April 1992 (see Gilbert and Doran’s Simulating societies: the computer simulation of social phenomena, 1994). The editors and contributors are very grateful to Cristiano Castelfranchi and Rosaria Conte for their hospitality in arranging the Siena meeting. As we note in the Introduction (Chapter 1), this volume and its predecessor provide evidence for the growth and current liveliness of the field. The vast power of current personal computers and the sophistication of the software and the programming tools now available means that increasingly the limit on the computer simulation of societies is not the difficulty of implementing simulations, but the imagination and creativity of the researcher. That this imagination is not lacking is shown by the range of contributions to this volume, which draws on almost the whole span of the social sciences to learn more about and experiment with everything from tastes for cultural objects to patterns of Aboriginal kinship, and from the organization of ant nests to the location of cities. The editors are grateful to Justin Vaughan and Kate Williams of UCL Press for their encouragement to embark on this series and for their patience in helping to put together the book, and to Jim Doran for his help in organizing the Siena conference. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Universities of Siena and Surrey. NIGEL GILBERT ROSARIA CONTE July 1994 Notes on contributors Robert Axelrod is the Arthur W.Bromage Distinguished University Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He received his BA in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and his PhD in political science from Yale University. He is the author of The evolution of cooperation (1984) and Conflict of interest (1970), the editor of Structure of decision (1976), and the author of numerous articles including “An evolutionary approach to norms” (1986). His work on cooperation and norms has received awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Political Science Association, the MacArthur Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences. He has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. Stéphane Bura is writing a doctoral thesis in distributed artifical intelligence at the Paris VI University. His research is focused on the emergence of structures in complex systems. His interests include artificial life, social simulation and memetics. Cristiano Castelfranchi is a researcher at the Institute of Psychology of the National Research Council of Italy. He has been the head of the Project for the Simulation of Social Behaviour since 1988. He is the author of several books on social and cognitive modelling. In 1992 and 1993 he was Programme Chairman of the European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World (MAAMAW). Federico Cecconi is with the Institute of Psychology of the National Research Council in Rome. He has a technical degree in computer science. He is interested in neural networks and genetic algorithms and in their application for both scientific and technological purposes. Antonio Cerini did his thesis work for a “laurea” in philosophy at the Institute of Psychology of the National Research Council in Rome. He is currently with ISED Informatica, a software house in Rome. Rosaria Conte is Researcher at the Institute of Psychology of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), Rome, and is teaching Cognitive and Social Psychology at the University of Torino. Her first degree is in philosophy and her post-graduate research training is in the cognitive modelling of social behaviour. She coordinates a research group on the simulation of social behaviour at the Institute of Psychology, with the aim of working out computational models of social phenomena both at the micro and at the macro levels. Her interests include cognitive modelling, social simulation, multi-agent systems, distributed artificial intelligence and the theory of rational action. Bruno Corbara has a doctorate in Ethology from the University of Paris XIII. His first degree is in psychology and his doctorate is on the social organization and its genesis in the Ectatomma ruidum ant. He has studied many species of social animals and has published two books on social insects. He is currently writing a book on the various building behaviours, either collective or individual, that exist in the animal world. His interests include self-organized systems, theories of behaviour, and statistical methods for ethological research. Jim Doran read mathematics at Oxford, became a specialist in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh and is now Professor at the University of Essex. Throughout his career he has applied statistical and computer methods in archaeology. His particular interest is in the simulation of societies using the concepts and techniques of distributed artificial intelligence. Alexis Drogoul is Assistant Professor at the University of Paris VI. His first degree is in computer science from the University of Paris VI and his doctorate is on the use of multi-agents systems in ethological simulation and problem solving. The main theme of his work concerns the ability of groups of agents to self-organize in order to produce functional collective responses, and more particularly, the emergence of these responses within groups of non-intelligent agents (also called reactive agents). His interests include biological simulation, theories of the emergence of cognition, and distributed problem solving. Massimo Egidi is Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Trento, Italy. He is especially interested in the theory of organization and collective decision making. Nicholas V.Findler is Research Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA. He has a BE (Honors, Summa-cum-Laude) in electrical engineering and a PhD in mathematical physics from the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary. He has worked in artificial intelligence since 1957. A large proportion of his projects over the past 12 years or so have been in the area of distributed artificial intelligence, ranging from applications in future air traffic control, street traffic signal control, through allocation of moving resources to moving tasks and nationwide manufacturing control, to studies of the intelligent and heterogeneous multi-agent systems described in this book.