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Science

Simulating Societies 231

Posted by michael from the playing-by-the-rules dept.
blamanj writes "Most of us were exposed fairly early to Conway's game of Life. A few simple rules produce a fascinating variety of behavior. Now, it appears that similar simulations can predict the behavior of populations and human societies."
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Simulating Societies More

Simulating Societies

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  • One word (Score:4, Funny)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:47AM (#3322327)
    Psychohistory!

    • Re:One word (Score:3, Funny)

      by Seska ( 253960 )
      Yeah, It's all fun and games until the Mule shows up.
      • I miss Asimov. I read almost all his sci-fi stories (except of the short stories).

        There's one book of him I haven't read yet because I couldn't find it: A Pebble In The Sky.. I wonder if I can find it anywhere.

        - Elkobim

        • Re:A pebble in the sky (Score:3, Informative)

          by fwc ( 168330 )
          Used on amazon from $2.00..

          http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345335635 [amazon.com]

          It is quite a good story, actually.

          • Used on amazon from $2.00..

            http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/034533563 5 [amazon.com]

            It is quite a good story, actually.

            Right now the Writers of America are boycotting Amazon. Every time you buy a used book from them the author gets nothing, nada, not a cent.

            They are the pirates of our generation, the RIAA of the MP3 world.

            As with music, where you should buy the CD from the musicians instead of thru RIAA (hint - they make $5 for a $6 CD they sell in person, and $0.02 for a $15 CD you buy thru RIAA) - for books you should buy from the author (e.g. printed book). they get no money for their work when you buy it used.

            Note that libraries do kick back to authors - and in Canada and the EU they kick back a big chunk of change. So please check it out at the library before you buy it used from Amazon.

            [note - I'm biased, I've sold stories myself]

            -
            • I'll probably get modded down for being off-topic, but there is a very specific point you are missing:

              A Pebble in the Sky is out of print. I couldn't buy it new if I wanted to.

              Let me tell you what I would like. I would like to be able to go to the authors site and buy a copy of an ebook directly from them without paying a publisher. I think that a lot of the publishers in this country are as bad as the RIAA as far as exploiting authors. I want to be able to buy in such a way as to have the majority of my funds go to the author of the book.

              But I digress. Back on the subject: In this specific situation, I don't see any option other than to buy used. In fact, the original poster said "I would have read it but I can't find a copy to read".

              One more point. In the US, as far as I know (and I've been around quite a few libraries in roles other than a patron), there are no royalties paid to authors. In fact, in a lot of cases a not insignificant portion of the library's collection consist of "used" donated books which someone has purchased, read and then donated.

        • Amazon Pebble in the sky [amazon.co.uk] has it on limited avalibilaty
    • Psychohistory!

      This post was only two minutes shy of being the most appropriate first-post in slashdot history.

      Beware The Mule.

    • Re:One word (Score:2, Interesting)

      by geeky-troll ( 552499 )
      Damn!! I wanted to submit that comment!!

      The question is: is this inspired by Asimovs' excellent work or is it a completely new approach???

      Do not beware of the Mule. Beware of Daneel R. Olivaw and his friend Giskard R. Relentlov..... They are much more dangerous....

      • Beware of Daneel R. Olivaw and his friend Giskard R. Relentlov..... They are much more dangerous....

        But, perhaps having Daneel there to guide the course of history is exactly what Seldon needs to cancel the Mule out.

        TWW

      • The question is: is this inspired by Asimovs' excellent work or is it a completely new approach???

        The impression I got from all the Foundation novels (Asimov's, at least) was that Psychohistory was 'Calculus for People'. It was a mathematical system for prediction of events. The processes described in the article are more simulative in nature. With Psychohistory, you have the initial conditions, apply your equations, and viola, instant future histories! With the 'Psyhco-simulator', the only way to see what will happen is to repeatedly apply the very simple rules of the game to your scenario and only then will you have any idea how things might turn out.

        It's not a perfect analogy, but... Psychohistory is to simulations as Newton is to Quantum Mechanics.

    • It sounded more like The Sims.

  • Related links... (Score:2, Informative)

    by qurob ( 543434 )
    A couple more samples... [yahoo.com]

    Music created [aol.com] using the game of life

  • Once again Pr1me history.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by popeydotcom ( 114724 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:49AM (#3322336) Homepage
    I had to write a "Life" program for the Pr1me as part of a college project years ago. It was ok when run on a VDU, but some fool ran it on a teletype... one box of paper later.. it was turned off.

  • It might be profitable for certain companies to monitor new Slashdot stories as they relate to human behavior. The rate of influx for new stories is bound to be inversely related to the workers' productivity :)

  • Turing Machine (Score:2, Informative)

    by qurob ( 543434 )

    If you're into this stuff, this link [rendell.uk.co] is cool.
  • I don't think simulations are ever going to get it right, because of so many possibilities that each of us encounter. People are too wishy washy, same events effect people differently, etc etc.

    • same events effect people differently

      I thought conception works the same way for all babies. Or do you mean when twins form or something goes wrong during conception and the baby has deformities or something?

    • Re:Chaos theory (Score:2, Insightful)

      by R2.0 ( 532027 )
      Ref. the first post: Hari Seldon's (OK, Isaac Asimov's) theory of Psychohistory has as it's base theorem that the behavior of individual humans is unpredictable, but the behavior of large groups of humans is predictable to within statistical limits. And if you think he's wrong, ask about marketing profiles and even Amazon's recommendations system.
      • Hari Seldon's (OK, Isaac Asimov's) theory of Psychohistory has as it's base theorem that the behavior of individual humans is unpredictable, but the behavior of large groups of humans is predictable to within statistical limits

        Another example of this is the information life insurance adjusters use. They can tell you with striking precision how many 30 year old males will die in a year out of 100,000. They just can't tell you which ones it will be.
    • Unfortunately for people who maintain that man is ineffable and that God is unknowable, the facts are that man is statistically predictable, easily manipulatable and, while he is imbued with a lab animal's right to do whatever he damn well chooses in a carefully controlled experiment, he rarely does so he is reducible to a mathematical theorem.

      As for God, when he calls you on the phone, tells you where Bin Laden's hiding and what the results of tomorrow's lotto pick, then you can publish a paper on his existence. Until then, less God and more functioning brain cells, please.
  • I predict that it your screensaver is Life, you'll get no work done.

  • So what? (Score:3, Funny)

    by SkyLeach ( 188871 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:57AM (#3322364) Homepage
    Preachers (albeit self-inflated ones), Theologians, Prophets and madmen have been doing that for years, albeit with little success.

    The primary problem is that the raw data cannot predict the movement of society, so therefor conjecture must be used. The conjecture is based on a hypothesis which is based on one of the obove basic viewpoints: religion vs. lack-thereof, pessimissm vs. optimism and basic intelligence of the average human vs. lack-thereof.

    Unless the person who writes the simulation is a prophet or exceptionally gifted, the software will be as flawed as any other model.
    • You're missing the point of the article (if you even read it). There is no "conjecture" and no raw data is used. Rather, very simple agent constructs are allowed to interact according to a set of very simple rules, and some amazingly complex behaviour results, some of which bears a striking resemblance to real-world observations.
    • Sociology has been working to predict group behavior since its inception. It's much like meteorology in that during the infancy of the science nobody had a freaking clue and most of the theories proposed were hogwash. But over time the models have been refined, and while not anywhere close to perfect weatherman have been handing out more accurate long range reports as time goes by.

      When I was a kid living in the Northwest, it was an astounding feat if a weatherman could deliver an accurate report for the next day (other than saying 'it'll probably rain', which anyone could state with a fair chance of being right). Nowadays weathermen are regularly accurate a week in advance, and for individual days within that week. That says something if you live in Oregon or Washington.

      Sociologists are treading much the same path. They've discarded most of the crap after spending the first 95% of their history examining mountains of data and trying to draw conclusions from it; now they're forming models and seeing how well they test for predictive value. Sure, the models will be wrong alot, especially at the beginning, but they *will* get better over time as refinement occurs. There's no reason to believe otherwise, as certain narrowly predictive models for large groups (e.g., insurance policies) are insanely accurate right now.

      No doubt some people will whine and moan that humans just aren't predictable (in an effort to convince themselves that they make their own destiny apart from the influences of society) but this is just spitting into the wind. Human groups are predictable; it's just a matter of finding the right models and correcting them over time.

      Max

  • Multiagent Systems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mellifluous ( 249700 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @08:02AM (#3322375)
    This article is really describing modeling using multiagent systems. Though very simple multiagent systems may resemble cellular automata (such as Conway's Life), they are not the same thing. Though they have been described in very convenient graphical representations using grids in the article, agents can model more complex behavior and need not be determinisitic (i.e. they may have a random element).

    Another way to look at it is that cellular automata like Life use a single deterministic rule to govern the whole system. Agent-based systems, on the other hand, model goal-oriented behavior of the individual objects.

    Again, Conway's game can be viewed as a very special case of an simple agent system, but the spirit of what is being done with agent systems is typically more involved. Comparing these systems to Conway's game of Life may create an incorrect impression for those not familiar with agent programming.

  • Worked with these guys in college (Score:4, Informative)

    by XDG ( 39932 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @08:04AM (#3322383) Journal
    I worked with Epstein and Axtell in college. The author's description of them is spot on, and they are both fantastic people.

    If you found this article interesting, their book is a great exposition of their early work with emergent behaviors. You can find it at Amazon here:

    Growing Artificial Societies [amazon.com]

    There is a similar article on complexity and emergent behavior in the latest Harvard Business Review.

    -XDG

    • I worked with that book in college, and I have to say that it is probably the worst academic text that I have ever seen, for a number of reasons.

      First, the book is full of examples, but nowhere to Epstein and Axtell give you enough information to actually reproduce their results (a classic mark of shady science).

      Second, there are parts of the book where they draw conclusions from things that are obviously simulation artifacts (ie. if you change the grid size, these effects disappear or are mitigated severely).

      Did I mention their lack of understanding of basic computer science issues? (Their formal training is in the social sciences).

      For a pair of scholars at the esteemed Brookings Institute, you would would expect more. Unfortunately, you wouldn't get it.

      Don't buy their book.

  • Uh... Police State? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Aix ( 218662 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @08:05AM (#3322385) Homepage
    The corruption/honesty simulation is very interesting, and they make a big deal about how everyone "turns blue" at the end, in other words, the whole society turns honest. The problem is that, if you look, there is a band of red dots right above the blue ones, which means that there were a huge number of "arrests" right before everyone "became honest." I don't know about you, but that sounds a lot like communism or the Taliban or Pat Robertson, or any number of other totalitarian situations. "If we just threaten to throw everyone in jail, everyone will become honest!"


    Hmmm... So the simulation is accurate, but I would hypothesize that it does not show that a free society will trend towards "honesty."

    • On the other hand, a very corrupt society is not likely to maintain much freedom at all. Think about the effects of a corrupt justice system.
    • I thought more Americans were currently incarcerated than the citizens of any other countries.
      • True; America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the largest number of prisoners. This is mostly due to the War on Drugs, which is putting people in jail for non-violent (and non-property) crimes. Stats on worldwide incarceration rates are available at http://www.prisonstudies.org/

        However, "Police State" usually connotes that people are imprisoned for beliefs, not actions. The US isn't considered a police state (except by a fringe population) because its OK in the US to advocate smoking pot, but it is illegal to actually perform the action.

        Personally, as a non-drug user, I think all drug laws should be repealed. Get rid of DUI and simply punish people for reckless driving. If you still feel the need to punish people extra for using drugs, increase penalties for crimes committed under the influence, whether it's vandalism or reckless driving or murder.

        -jon

        • This is mostly due to the War on Drugs, which is putting people in jail for non-violent (and non-property) crimes

          <SARCASM>
          Come on, using drugs helps terrorists. I saw it on TV, so I know it must be true.
          </SARCASM>

          (SARCASM tags added under the ADA to assist the sarcasm impaired.)
          • Thing is, using drugs DOES help fund terrorists. Colombian, Peruvian, and Mexican terrorists are basically funded by US drug consumption, while the Taliban and Al Qeida were funded by heroin use in Europe (particularly England). (To be fair to our "friends" the Saudis, they still fund the Taliban and Al Qeida, too. I just think Osama et. al. liked the irony of making money to destroy the West by poisoning the West via drug use).

            Think Prohibition. It was better for August Busch to be supplying America with alcohol than it was for Al Capone. We may have more drunks, but we have fewer Valentine Day Massacres. And the government certainly collects more in taxes from sales of Bud than they did from sales of whatever hooch Capone was peddling.

            If the government officially sanctions the sale of Coke, Heroin, Pot, PCP, Crystal, LSD, X, whatever, it would make a forture for the government in tax revenues. Heck, if drug companies could make and sell recreational drugs, the cost of the pills that actually help people would drop like a rock. Cancer drugs subsided by crack. I like the idea.

            -jon

    • BUG IN THE MODEL (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Medievalist ( 16032 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @01:32PM (#3324436)
      /.
      A fatal flaw of this simulation (as a model of real society, that is) is that it includes the "Cincinatus" characters - the incorruptible agents - but does not include the "Dillingers" - agents who are not deterred by punishment, of themselves or of others.

      I have found over the years that people who are not influenced by "common sense" (or even an informed sense of self-preservation) are much more common than incorruptible people. Luckily (perhaps) these people more commonly are obsessed with greed than killing, or we'd have a lot more mayhem and a few less rich people.

      Thus, the simultation should include agents that are not influenced by the arrest rate, and the model will probably become cyclic instead of trending to a fixed equilibrium.

      Your statement that "the simulation is accurate" is unfounded, as any serious study of real behaviour in a police state will show. The Chinese shoot homosexuals and drug addicts; yet they still occur just as frequently as in other nations with less draconian laws. The US is "soft on crime" according to the Immoral Minority, yet our crime rates continue to drop.

      But of course, anyone who thinks humans are simple agents with simple motivations is very unobservant.

      --Charlie
      • "But of course, anyone who thinks humans are simple agents with simple motivations is very unobservant."

        This is just silly. No-one argues that it is not a complex situation, but on the same note, It is possible to model cell behaviour without accounting for the mitochondria, since the whole of the cell acts consistently. As a whole, so do humans, so we can model group behaviour without finding out everyone's height, weight, and sex.
    • Not to mention executing them with lethal injections would probably be more efficient. The problem is that the level of "arrests" thepends itself on the average "honesty" in a society, and can only GRADUALLY change.

      I know, because i live in a corrupt, supid country like argentina where there are tons of honest and great people, but the mayority....welll......

  • Dr Seldon ? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by cheekymonkey_68 ( 156096 )
    Remember Asimov's Foundation series where Dr Seldon used mathematics and psychologists to predict and model the behavior of populations and human societies.

    Asimov has a habit of predicting scientic advances such as robotics(Everyone know Asimovs laws of robotics ?)

    Ok he was basing it on the presumption that you could predict the behviour of very large population (ie whole planets),but the concept was the same

    Better watch out for the Mule...
  • Someone should run an experiment and force traffic to be out of my way on my way to and from work. That would make me honestly less pissed when I get there. I would then be less corrupt and more apt to leave the office supplies at the office.

  • Hari Seldon (Score:3, Funny)

    by skankbot ( 216723 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @08:08AM (#3322399)
    The "Foundation" series by Issac Azimov never really seemed too far fetched to me. The ability of dedicated mathematicians to predict the course of large enough groups of human beings seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable, given enough variables and a population size that minimizes the chance for really unique/aberant behaviours. Now we have the computing power to back it all up.

    For those of you who will counter that I'm neglecting the point of the Second Foundation manipulating things... don't spoil it for me. Seldon still had to get at least the first several decades right you know.

    • Re:Hari Seldon (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @08:37AM (#3322505)
      The "Foundation" series by Issac Azimov never really seemed too far fetched to me. The ability of dedicated mathematicians to predict the course of large enough groups of human beings seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable, given enough variables and a population size that minimizes the chance for really unique/aberant behaviours. Now we have the computing power to back it all up.
      Lack of computing power hasn't been a problem for a long time - I wrote simulations like this on a VAX in the early 80's.

      The problems lie elsewhere. Two that come to mind quickly are (1) lack of agreed upon factual data to use as the basis of the hypotheses. Do people with green skin have more or fewer babies out of wedlock than people with orange skin, and has this number increased or decreased over the last 10 years? Even in the US, with the Census data and tremendous amounts of market research, there are no agreed-upon answers to fundamental questions of data. Plenty of Newtons but no Kepler.

      (2) None of these models are reversible. Put in a starting point of today's conditions, set the time increment to -1, and run the simulation backwards for 100 years. What comes out will be nothing like the world as it actually was in 1900. If we can't accuratly predict what happened in the past, how can we have any belief that the models tell us anything meaningful about the future?

      sPh

      • Re:Hari Seldon (Score:4, Interesting)

        by fwc ( 168330 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @09:12AM (#3322656)
        (2) None of these models are reversible. Put in a starting point of today's conditions, set the time increment to -1, and run the simulation backwards for 100 years. What comes out will be nothing like the world as it actually was in 1900. If we can't accuratly predict what happened in the past, how can we have any belief that the models tell us anything meaningful about the future?

        You're correct about the models not necessarily being reversable - meaning that you can't predict history from the future. However, the correct method of verifying a simulation as correct is to verify the simulation results against known data. In the article, where it talks about the Anasazi, they describe writing the simulation and then letting it run through they years that they have data about the Anasazi (where the villiages are, the water availability, etc) and comparing it to reality. As described, they got quite close to reality. Villiages ending up in the same spot as reality over 50% of the time, etc. etc. etc.. Remember, it is very hard to determine the cause (or stimulus) from the effect without additional data. However, if the cause (stimulus) is known, the effect is usually fairly easy to guess.

        If we were to try to build a model of today's history, you would want to build the model, seed it like the world was in the 1700's or earlier and let it run, and see how often it ended up correct. If it wasn't quite accurate, figure out where your model is wrong, fix, and repeat.

        In the Asimov stories, what Hari Seldon was doing was to come up with a set of "formulas" (stored in the prime radiant) which accurately simulated history. The more accurate the formulas and the data you have, the more correct you are going to be. Hari and the members of the Foundation were constantly working on tweaks to better account for errors in the simulation. The hard part is dealing with the truly random influences. For instance, in the article when they talked about the Anasazi, they used real weather data instead of simulating it. I suspect if the weather data was simulated, the simulation would not have been as accurate on a year-to-year basis, although if the weather simulation was realistic enough I suspect that the outcome would have been similar.

        Thinking back about Psychohistory as put forward by Asimov, I think that the only thing which really stretches for me is the accuracy (within a few months) of the events which he predicted-- taking into account the numerous variables which have such a rare occurance (such as an asteroid hitting a planet wiping everything out, or another major random event), that it would be throw the accuracy of small-scale events off. It seems logical that you can be accurate on a large scale on a simulation (over many thousands of years) or on a small scale (over a hundred years or so), but not both with the same simulation.

        • Re:Hari Seldon (Score:4, Interesting)

          by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @09:32AM (#3322825)
          You're correct about the models not necessarily being reversable - meaning that you can't predict history from the future. However, the correct method of verifying a simulation as correct is to verify the simulation results against known data.
          This is a very interesting question with a lot of good arguments and points of view to be hashed out. So I won't make any strong statements about Elphick and fwc's arguments, just that I respectfully disagree with them.

          The problem with the "running forward from 1900" test is that the model includes, both explicitly and subconsciously, the model maker's view and understanding of the world that already exists. Including the events that occured between 1900 and 2000, say. So of course you would expect it to show reasonably accurate results for that time period - otherwise it would have been discarded during the development phase. However, that is no guarantee that the model is accurate outside the limits of that perception of the world.

          I ran into exactly this problem myself. I developed several system dynamics models that seemed to give a good simulation of the population and wealth of the City of Chicago from 1950 to 1980. But when I ran them starting with the base data for similar cities, I got meaningless results. What seemed on first examination to be a general model of city population was actually just a condensed way of displaying the known state of one particular city.

          So stronger tests than just "run forward to known state" are needed. Some argue that human events include irreversible processes, so perhaps the "run backwards" test is not valid. But more is needed than a demonstration between two known states.

          sPh

          • Maybe it can predict what WILL happen, and not WHEN it will happen. Of course, to be even remotely close to what will happen, the results must be completely "wierd" or even ridiculous.

            Maybe there is some kind of nuclear war, maybe not, yet, the long term predicions should match no matter how long it takes us to reach them.

            I don't think you can both predict what will happen and WHEN will happen. You just can't unless you simulate atom for atom, dna for dna. Which is like duplicating the world (of course you could eventually do that, but by then we'll no longer be humans).
      • If we can't accuratly predict what happened in the past, how can we have any belief that the models tell us anything meaningful about the future?

        Well, of course. What if a nuke slipped caused by a hardware failure or someone gone insane? The model would have been 100000x wrong, even if it was perfect. I think the main reason you can predict a line is because our world puts too much power in few individuals (say: Bush, Sadam, the guy with the finger in the button, etc). So eventually, you'd need to emulate a perfect sadam, a perfect bush and know if Bush or gore would win an election. That would depend on legal muscle and unkown variables (to the general public at least)...

        So eventually, it could predict what would happen but assuming the world is run in a way consensus prevails, and not just 10 guys moving the world and AFFECTING all the population, but the inverse.

        It would be usefull though to predict short/medium term results given constant update of what this guys are doing. Societies don't change much over the years.
    • I think you'd still run into the "Butterfly Effect". You know, the one in chaotic systems where a really small variance in initial conditions winds up with a major change later?

      Of course, psychohistory was a statistical science, dealing with the probability that a large mass of people would do X...
  • One thing that I've found interesting is how closely *any* group can be predicted -- this from the three or four required sociology courses in college. Many of use here pride ourselves on having different values than the mainstream population. However, the behaviour of the niche groups can be eerily predicted by statistical models to the point that it's now a business tool and not just cool science. So we may not be able to predict that an individual is a devoted Bob Dylan fan, but they can probably see upswings in folk music and tie dyes whenever a war is brewing in the (insert region here).

    --
    Everybody must get stoned.

    • Re:Sociology (Score:3, Insightful)

      by punchdrunk ( 257279 )

      But that's exactly what the corruption/honesty simulation is trying to argue against. It is saying that traditional social science modelling is fundamentally flawed because it assumes everyone in a particular group behaves the same and has unlimited knowledge.

      A social model that viewed individuals as multiple copies of the same fully informed person could thus never "see" the social transformation that Hammond found, for the simple reason that without diversity and limited knowledge, the transformation never happens. Given that human beings are invariably diverse and that the knowledge at their disposal is invariably limited, it would seem to follow that even societies in which unsophisticated people obey rudimentary rules will produce surprises and discontinuities--events that cannot be foreseen either through intuition or through the more conventional sorts of social science.

      • That's exactly it. There's no predicting the individual, just as there's no predicting a particular stock. But many models *can* predict with great accuracy the buying habits of particular demographics. But I'm not talking about models, as the article does, but of statistics that merely describe a particular attribute of a data set. They are completely different things. I.e., one is trying to mimic and one describes. If the model is accurate it parallel real events for a short while. A statistic is *always* correct (bad math or reporting notwithstanding); how you interpret them is an entirely different matter.
  • This reminds me of Seldon's statistical sociology work in the Foundation series (most explicitly in the first book) -- where he expounds that, as a large group, people are statistically very predictible, and reasonably controlable as a result.

    Other large scale societal modeling took place with The Club of Rome's Limits to Growth [clubofrome.org] -- It used the SIMULA simulation language to investigate such questions as population growth, resource usage, environmental degradation and capital investment as co-related variables. They came to some very interesting (and even disturbing) conclusions.

    • [The Club of Rome]They came to some very interesting (and even disturbing) conclusions.
      Yes, those models are fun to play around with. Are there any open source Dynamo systems out there?

      Problem is, the Club of Rome predicted that everyone in the Western world would either be starving to death or choked in their own waste by the far-off year 2000. Looking out my window today, I see that things are far from perfect, but we have a higher population, more food, and in many respects less pollution than we did in 1975. So the CoR's models were dead wrong.

      sPh

      • Problems with the models (Score:3, Interesting)

        by DG ( 989 )
        The major problems with the models is that they are not very good at handling technological change that in turn makes fundamental changes in the values the models use to make its predictions.

        For example, let's say your population growth model includes a value for "food value produced per acre of land". If something comes along that allows more food to be produced per acre, then that'll skew the models to hell.

        This actually happened. A new strain of wheat (?) was produced a few years ago that was able to survive in much tougher conditions, and that single-handedly staved off starvation in India.

        The same with waste levels. recycling has become much more prevelent, and modern cars are so much better that they're actually starting to _clean_ the air that passes through them.

        The models were accurate the day they were published, but the run conditions have changed since.

        DG
      • Part of the strength of the Club of Rome argument was that they did lots of runs with their simulator with lots of different parameters, and although the details varied, the model just about always predicted environmental catastrophy. The conclusion was that we were all in Big Trouble.

        The simulator was a mainframe program when it was written in the 1970s, and only the High Priests could run it. Eventually, it was ported to PC, and anyone could play with it.

        I read an article (Dr. Dobbs Journal?) a few years ago by someone who spent some time running the simulator with various assumptions. He found that the model was *very* sensitive to a single parameter--I think it was pollution per capita. If that parameter was set above certain value, then the model predicted environmental catastrophy, pretty much independently of everything else.

        This led me to discount the predictive value of the model.

        - SWM
        • He found that the model was *very* sensitive to a single parameter--I think it was pollution per capita. If that parameter was set above certain value, then the model predicted environmental catastrophy, pretty much independently of everything else.

          Which is an interesting result. It suggests that this is the key thing for society to concentrate on in order to prevent disaster.

          Of course you don't want to embark on such a course based purely on Limits to Growth, but the value of such simulations is that they tell you where the hidden levers are, even if they can't give precise predictions about what happens when you pull them.

          Paul.

  • Damn, when I read the header, I really thought we were all talking about The Game of Life [boardgamecentral.com]

    Was I the only one who thought that?
  • What about Black and White. Wouldn't that be a society?

  • We are simple (Score:2, Interesting)

    by oogoody ( 302342 )
    It's not just that the simulations use
    simple rules, but we humans use simple rules
    too because we are simple minded and are usually
    driven by simple heuristics. It's not suprising
    that the simulated behaviour closely matches
    real behaviour. Fot it to be otherwise would
    take a level of intelligence we don't seem
    to have.
  • From the article:

    As in real life, a few A-firms live and thrive for generations, but most are evanescent, and now and then a really big one collapses despite having been stable for years. Sometimes the addition of one slacker too many can push a seemingly solid firm into instability and fission; but you can't be sure in advance which firm will crumble, or when.

    Sound familiar to anyone?
  • This was really cool reading!
    I must say I enjoyed this story very much.

  • I'm pretty sure I had a version of this simulator on my Commodote 64 back in the mid 1980s. Of course, with a 320x200 grid and a 1MHz processor, it took many hours for the segregation to be complete. I remember being fascinated by it.

  • Getting it backwards (Score:2, Insightful)

    by RedGuard ( 16401 )
    From what the article describes, the people doing these experiments have got their research backwatds. Specficially finding that a particular set of assumptions to a simulation generates a result 'like' human society is meaningless unless you also show that the assumptions are legitimate. The racism example was particularly egregious; nowhere is it explained why ignoring the effect of income distribution, access to jobs, the actions of the government, etc on where people lived was valid. It gives the strong impression that showing that racial division arises from inscrutable preferences is attractive for political reasons more than anything.
    • It's a question of what conclusions you draw. I agree with you that drawing the conclusion that segregation has nothing to do with income distribution, access to jobs etc. would not be valid (that is not to say that it might not be true, but the conclusion can't validly be drawn from the experiment).

      But it does demonstrate how unlikely it is that an integrated environment will be the result if a significant part of members of society is looking for an "integrated" neighborhood:

      Everyone that moves to a neighborhood raises the chance that the neighborhood, or parts of it becomes becomes dominated enough by a particular race that fewer people consider it integrated. This causes a domino effect: Everyone looking for integration will keep on moving out of "ghettos", and will extend the ghettos that way.

      As such it demonstrates that wanting to live in an integrated environment is not necessarily achieved by moving to the best integrated environment, but by moving into the proximity of a ghetto of predominantly people of another race.

      That is unlikely to happen unless the "ghetto" has desirable factors. Such factor might be to be prestigeous, to have low crime rates, good schools etc. However those factors are closely related to the issues you bring up, and if people in the poor group wants to integrate they can't afford to, and if people in the "wealthy" group wants to help integration they have to move to the "bad part of town".

      So even if the model is extremely simplistic, it does point at one possible contributing factor to the formation of ghettos: Everything else being equal, for integration to occur a significant amount of people need to be willing to either move to or stay in an area they perceive as a ghetto with mostly people of another race.

  • not buying it (Score:2, Insightful)

    by boojum.cat ( 150829 )
    The article reminded me of the old story of the experimentall physicist who runs excitedly up to his theorist colleague, exclaiming "Look! I can show that A > B!" The theorist says, "That's easy to explain. [Explanation deleted...]" The experimentalist says, "Did I say A > B? I meant B > A.", to which the theorist replies, "Oh, that's even easier to explain."

    The models described seem far too simple to describe something as complicated as society. As a physicist who has dabbled in biology, I know the perils of applying simple models to biological systems. How sensitive are these models to the addition of another type of interaction between people, or another outside influence? For every simple model that shows A>B, I can come up with one that shows B>A, unless the simple model is very well rooted in fhe fundamental physics (or sociology) of the problem. I don't believe that the fundamentals of sociology are well enough established to make these models believable.

    For example, consider the Schelling model of segregation discussed in the article. From a physicist's point of view, this is a statisictal simulation of a system of two types of particles on a lattice, with an attractive interaction between particles of the same type. There's no temperature, so the system will phase separate, since that's the lowest energy state. No surprise there. A five minute chat with a physicist could have saved Schelling a lot of computer time. The more interesting question is what happens when you add some randomness in the form of temperature. Then the system will phase separate below a certain temperature, and form a single mixed phase above that temperature. What is the sociological analog of temperature? (Ok, I know that one... If a particle of one type is hot for a particle of another type, then you get particles of mixed type....)

    The simulations are cute and I'm sure they're fun to play with, but I wouldn't put much stock in them.

    -- Steve

  • tit for tat (Score:3, Insightful)

    by geoswan ( 316494 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @09:56AM (#3322976) Journal
    In the eighties a guy named Robert Axelrod ran a tournament. Participants submitted computer programs, that were to interact with one another. The "society" they simulated was very simple. They could use any strategy to play the "prisoner's dilemma". [sunysb.edu]

    The program that ended up as the most successful was also the simplest. University of Toronto Game Theorist Anatol Rappaport had submitted a program he called tit for tat. [google.ca] Tit for tat initially cooperated with all the other players. In subsequent turns if the other player it was interacting with had defected last turn, it defected this turn. If the other player had cooperated last turn it cooperated this turn.

    Yes, the interactions between people are very complicated, and this game is very simple. Still food for thought though.

  • For those interested in the subject of simulating artifical societies in silico i strongly recommend:

    (Sorry, i'm against linking to online book stores)

    Growing Artificial Societies - Social Science from the Bottom Up

    Joshua M. Epstein & Robert Axtell

    ISBN 0-262-55025-3
  • So are there twice as many trolls as offtopics, 10 times as many trolls as insightful posts, and so on?

    • Re:/. and Zipf's Law (Score:3, Interesting)

      by flufffy ( 192294 )
      no, but seriously, you could count things like the length of each post (e.g. by counting # of characters), there would be a few very long posts and many many short posts, with the average length of post being quite short. maybe you could also do this with the # of posts in each discussion, with there being a few discussions with 1000's of posts and the majority being below 150/200 or so.

      i've done this in other research, it checks out, it's pretty neat to calculate the length of posts/conversations etc, rank them and graph them, and see a zipf distribution pop out. anybody else out there doing this?

  • JASSS - journal for this kind of thing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by eddy ( 18759 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @11:31AM (#3323642) Homepage Journal

    The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) [surrey.ac.uk]. It is on-line. It is free. It is great.

  • People trading stocks for profit is a subset of society. No one has been able to predict market futures accurately. Ask Long Term Capital, the hedge firm full of Nobel economists, that almost took out the world economy four years ago.

    The problem is that once someone figures out some new profitable information about the market, it works for a while until enough people figure out the same method. Then it becomes useless.

    I expect prediction of society as a whole to fail for the same reason. When people learn what is being predicted, they'll do sometime new and unpredictable.
    • Depends on the model. In stock markets, we have self-defeating prophecies; if everybody knows a stock is going up, it's too late, it's already up. In other situations you may have self-fullfilling prophecies - 'There's going to be a war at some point, we know it, they know it, so we better attack first.'

      The trick is knowing which is which...
  • We could play "The World" in real-time on a huge, distributed network of some kind, something like a mix of E-Bay, Everquest and IRC only much, much greater. Add some CNN Online for thrills and feed /. streams at random. Something like that. Make it browserbased.

    We could "simulate" all sorts of events, you know, terrorist attacks, meteor impacts or natural disasters. Anything. The winners would sweep the stakes according to some sort of victory resolution scheme. Maybe THAT could be coded in Perl.

    All players could "initiate" actions at any time that would, eventually, over many turns, determine the final outcome. Players could interact with one another according to some proximity scheme. Players could coorperate toward common goals.

    At intervals we could make tournaments, where the winners of the local series would compete in the World Series. The World Champion would collect a huge prize and maybe move into The White House.

    Hmmm. I think I'll go to the pub...
  • Check out this cellular automaton which I made which makes some cool graphics:

    www.geocities.com/enriqueeder/trip.html [geocities.com]

    Each pixel is a cell in the automaton. Each cell has 3 quantities each of which has a value between 0 and 255. The quantities correspond to the amount of red, green and blue in the color of the cell.

    The color of each cell in the next frame of the simulation depends on its current color and the color of its neighbors in the current frame. The rule is that each quantity (red, green and blue) has an enemy or inhibitor quantity. For example green is by default the enemy of red, so the more green a cell's neighbors have in the current frame, the less red that cell will have in the next frame. Red is also the enemy of blue, and blue is the enemy of green. So each quantity has an enemy.

    The simulation is seeded with a randomly colored cell by clicking on the black screen. To run the simulation, click the Go button. To stop it, click the Stop button. To advance just one frame click the Step button.

    If you click the Design button, a window will pop up where you can modify the parameters of the calculation. The Neighbors amount determines how much the amount of the enemy quantity in a cell's neighbors affects that cell in the next frame. The Self amount determines how much the cell stays true to its current color. The Enemy amount affects how much one quantity is affected by its enemy quantity. The Direction button flips the quantities' enemies.

    The unexpected result is trippy swirling patterns as red chases green, green chases blue and blue chases red.
  • I would like to see simulations of the slashdot community's overall response to moderation, membership fees, advertising, etc. Also, simulations of diverse markets of computer users in selecting operating systems would be interesting. Will answer questions like "will MS rule the world?", "are all the Linux companies doomed?", "is Steve Jobs insane?", and of course, "is BSD dying?"
  • This topic has interested me for a while. There's a pretty closely related field called computational economics [wustl.edu], with papers and conferences and the whole bit.

    CS nerds might be in a good position to end the recession. We know how to do big simulations and distributed computing and how to mine for data to feed a simulation. We know how to run several simulations in parallel, each representing a different course of economic intervention.

    The economy is driven primarily by human actions and decisions. In principle, humans could all agree that recessions are bad, and each tweak our behavior to end the damn thing. Given how much suffering the economy can cause, it seems ridiculous to leave it entirely to chance.

    It may turn out that benign interventions are impossible because of conflicts of interest (an individual's own interests dictate behavior that prolongs the recession or injures society, what the economics folks call a tragedy of the commons [dieoff.org]). But it might at least merit investigation.

    My own small effort in this direction appears in my sig.

  • This story should have been from the hari seldon dept.
  • I started a project on Savannah a couple of weeks ago to create simulations of chaordic organizations and processes under the GPL License.

    The word "chaordic" is used as defined by Dee Hock (the person behind VISA) at http://www.chaordic.org [chaordic.org] and in his book "Birth of the Chaordic Age", which is essentially processes at the boundary between CHAos and ORDer and the social implications for how to design effective and responsive organizations for a dynamic society. The focus will be specially on computer simulations to support part of the goal defined here http://www.chaordic.org/who_hist.html#FourCond [chaordic.org] of: "Development of visual and physical models of chaordic organizations so that people have something to examine, experiment with, and compare to existing organizations. The models must contain the ethical and spiritual dimensions generally lacking in current models. In addition, computer simulations will need to be created to allow people to quickly see how clarity of purpose and principles allow institutions to self-organize, evolve over decades, and link in new patterns for an enduring constructive society."

    People are invited to join the mailing list if they want at this page http://mail.freesoftware.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/ simulchaord-discuss [fsf.org] if you want to contribute to project related discussions or submit snippets of code (with the understanding contributions will be archived and can be incorporated into the project under the GPL license). I have been posting some artificial life links there related to modelling social systems to get things started -- one of the first was a link to the Atlantic Monthly article discussed in this Slashdot thread. For now, I am using use the list to record my own musings on related simulation issues including design, architecture, and use cases. I will also be posting my experiences as I try to create such simulations. Feel free to lurk for a while or chime in.

    Here is a page leading to the entire mailing list archives (aroudn twenty messages so far): http://mail.freesoftware.fsf.org/pipermail/simulch aord-discuss/ [fsf.org]

    The main project page is here: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/simulchaord/ [gnu.org] Cooperative development of releases of code is hosted on Savannah using CVS although I haven't yet put up any content (files or homepage) besides what's archived in the mailing list.

    At the moment I am looking at using Swarm http://www.swarm.org [swarm.org] as the base -- although I may just use Python instead -- or even use both for different aspects.

  • Introspective Models (Score:3, Informative)

    by gnovos ( 447128 ) <gnovos@chi[ ]d.net ['ppe' in gap]> on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:02PM (#3326695) Homepage Journal
    The main problem with models like these is that they do not often take into account the dynamic nature of the "rules" that govern the simulated people. In the real world, people are able to change the rules that they live by, self-programming in a sense. For example, if we were to run a model that used the "rules" that governed race-relations in the 1800 and attempt to run that simulation forward to today, we would find that the end result is drastically different than the world we live in today, becuase the rules themlesves are evolving as the simulation moves forward. Maybe when simulating frog populations, this kind of rule-changing is less common, but when simulating people, it will always happen.

    People have the ability to see the broader picture and alter the way the work in it. For example, in the scenario from the article where any particular square bases it's actions on the squares next to it, a "human" square would base it's rules on the squares next to it, BUT also on the makup of the board as a whole.

    Once the simulators begin to allow the rules themselves to change, then we will see some really amazing results.

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