On Modelling in Memetics - Bruce Edmonds
Of course the weakness of this type of model, if it is taken in isolation, is that one might be mistaken. A process may appear to be evolutionary but later turn out to be otherwise. If one took the step of defining evolutionary process by its (high-level) phenomena, then one would no longer have a theory but just a description.
To illustrate this case I present a computational model, consisting of a collection of agents which interact and communicate with each other as they learn about what is best to do and say. In this simulation it appears that a memetic process is taking place (if one just considers the output in terms of who said what to whom), but it turns out (if one analyses the internal processes that produce this behaviour) that these results are actually caused by agents coming simultaneously to the same conclusions about what to say. This simulation is analysed elsewhere in detail for some of its other properties in [9, 10]. It requires some detail of the model set-up to be understood for the relevance of the example to be become clear, but I have tried to keep it as simple as possible by relegating much of the technicalities to an appendix (section 7). This model can be seen as an extension of the work in [1], which investigates a three player game.
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