Agent based simulation of the evolution of society as an alternate maximzation problem

Abstract

Understanding the evolution of human society, as a complex adaptive system, is a task that has been looked upon from various angles. In this paper, we simulate an agent-based model with a high enough population tractably. To do this, we characterize an entity called society, which helps us reduce the complexity of each step from O(n2) to O(n). We propose a very realistic setting, where we design a joint alternate maximization step algorithm to maximize a certain fitness function, which we believe simulates the way societies develop. Our key contributions include (i) proposing a novel protocol for simulating the evolution of a society with cheap, non-optimal joint alternate maximization steps (ii) providing a framework for carrying out experiments that adhere to this joint-optimization simulation framework (iii) carrying out experiments to show that it makes sense empirically (iv) providing an alternate justification for the use of society in the simulations.

Publication
Behavioural and Social Computing, 2017, Krakow