Capturing Social Embeddedness: a constructivist approach - Bruce Edmonds

4 A Model of Co-evolving Social Agents

The model described below is illustrative - it illustrates the possibility of social embedding. Despite the obvious analogies with human social interaction, it does not attempt to be descriptively realistic. Instead it is designed to reveal the sort of phenomena that can emerge in a collection of socially situated agents - ones that co-develop behavioural strategies in an open-ended way, where these strategies can include references to the actions and utterances of specific agents in their society. The choice of the learning algorithm based on genetic programming is so as to bias the agents as little as possible with a priori specifications of the `desirable' strategy, but to allow the emergence of behaviours from their reaction to the environment and each other. The primitives that determine the range of strategies is designed to be as expressive as possible, thus it allows everything from purely social strategies such as following a leader, to implementations of the sort of randomised mixed strategy that might be suggested by game theory.

4.1 - The Set-up
4.2 - The Results
4.3 - More Detailed Case Studies
4.4 - Comments

Capturing Social Embeddedness: a constructivist approach - Bruce Edmonds - 30 OCT 98

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