Growing artificial societies

What Hacker News says

1. briankellyApr 2023
   Growing Artificial Societies is an interesting book that extrapolates on this.
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2. QuequauFeb 2019
   Years ago I read "Growing Artificial Societies - Social Science from the Bottom Up" by Joshua M. Epstein and Robert L. Axtell and was really motivated to do computer modeling as some sort of hobby.

   For me at least the problem was once I got their original model up and running I wasn't able to sustain the focus to construct a graphical representation that was compelling. So I never went back and debugged the stuff that I added to model (not seriously anyway).

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3. QuequauNov 2017
   I found Epstein's book on Sugarscape, "Growing artificial societies: social science from the bottom up", to be fascinating. I'm not much of a programmer but I've tinkered around with various basic implementations of his simulations a fair bit.

   It's sorta unfortunate that for the most part the graphics wind up being so rudimentary. Besides not really being able to convey all the things going on in the simulation the end result ends up being a lot less compelling than reading the book about it... or at least to my mind it did.

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4. chasingsparksOct 2009
   The source cited, Benhockers book (http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Evolution-Complexity-Eco...), was a great introduction to "complexity economics". However, if you are more interested in the actual work, head to amazon and buy Growing Artificial Societies (http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Artificial-Societies-Science-A...) or head to Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=8sXENe8QrmYC&dq=growing...).
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5. nivertechMar 2025
   > AI agents are rational agents. They make rational decisions

   this is wrong, it's almost impossible to build a fully-rational (in the Game-Theoretic sense) agent for almost any real life usecase, except some textbook toy problems.

   There are many levels of Intelligence/Cognitions for Agents.

   Here's an incomplete hierarchy out of my head (the real classification will deserve a whole blog post or a paper):

     - Dumb/NPC/Zero-Intelligence
     - Random/Probabilistic
     - Rule-based / Reflexive
     - Low-Rationality
     - Boundedly-Rational
     - Behavioral (i.e. replicating a recorded behavior of a real-life entity/phenomena)
     - Learning (e.g. using AI/ML or simple statistics)
     - Adaptive (similar to learning agents, but may take different (better) actions in the same situation)
     - [Fully-]Rational / Game-Theoretic
   
   

   "A rational actor - a perfectly informed individual with infinite computing capacity who maximizes a fixed (non-evolving) exogenous utility function"[1] bears little relation to a human being.[2]

   --

   [1] Aaron, 1994

   [2] Growing Artificial Societies -- Joshua M. Epstein & Robert L. Axtell

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6. briankellyJan 2019
   You're right, there is this other side to the coin. I'm also not aware of research studying these high order effects. I wonder if you could apply the approach from the book Growing Artificial Societies, which is basically generative modeling of social organization, but I don't think that approach has a lot of academic support.
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