Artificial society
computational model
An artificial society is an agent-based computational model for computer simulation in social analysis. It is mostly connected to the themes of complex systems, emergence, the Monte Carlo method, computational sociology, multi-agent systems, and evolutionary programming. While the concept was simple, actually realizing this conceptual point took a while. Complex mathematical models have been, and are, common; deceivingly simple models only have their roots in the late forties, and took the advent of the microcomputer to really get up to speed.
Overview
The aim is to construct parallel simulations consisting of computational devices, referred to as agents, with given properties, in order to model the target phenomena. The subject is the process of emergence from the lower (micro) level of a social system to the higher (or macro) level.
The history of agent-based modeling can be traced back to Von Neumann machines, the concept of a machine capable of reproduction. The device he proposed would follow precisely detailed instructions to fashion a copy of itself. The concept was then extended by von Neumann's friend Stanislaw Ulam, also a mathematician, who suggested that the machine be built on paper, as a collection of cells on a grid. The idea intrigued von Neumann, who drew it up, thus creating the first of the devices later termed cellular automata.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 7, 2021. The linked authority identifier is Q4801096. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Artificial society” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.