4 A Model of Co-evolving Social Agents

4.4 Comments

• the expressions that the agents develop strategies that are opportunistic - they do not reflect their social reality but rather constitute it as causal elements;

• the strategies can appear highly arbitrary - it can take a great deal of work to unravel them if one attempts to explicitly trace the complex networks of causation (see the examples in the case studies above);

• the agents frequently do use incorporate information about the communication and actions of other individual agents instead of attempting to predict their environment using global models - this is partly confirmed by a general analysis of the general distribution of primitive types in the expressions chosen and developed by agents in figure 19. Here we can see that the primitives for concerning others actions and utterances are heavily selected for, while those involving global statistics, random elements or backward looking primitives are selected against;

• the agents do specialise as they co-develop their strategies - this is not so apparent from the above but is examined in greater depth elsewhere [14];

Figure 19. Distribution of the relative proportions of some primitive types in the run using the crowd-avoiding scheme with only listening enabled (ca+l)

It is unclear whether there was anything that might correspond to the emergence of social structures, but I would expect that such would only result from longer and more sophisticated simulations than the above.

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