Artificial society

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Artificial Society is the specific agent based computational model for computer simulation in social analysis. It is mostly connected to the theme in complex system, emergence, Monte Carlo Method, computational sociology, multi agent system, and evolutionary programming. The concept itself is simple enough. Actually reaching this conceptual point took a while. Complex mathematical models have been, and are, common; deceivingly simple models only have their roots in the late forties, and took the advent of the microcomputer to really get up to speed.

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The idea is to construct the computational devices (known as agents with some properties) to be parallelly simulated to capture the real phenomena. The concept is the emergence process from the lower (micro) level of social system to the higher level (macro).

The history of agent based model can be traced back to the Von Neumann machines suggesting a machine capable of reproduction. The device he proposed would follow precisely detailed instructions to fashion a copy of itself. The concept is then improved by von Neumann's friend Stanislaw Ulam, also a mathematician, suggested that the machine be built on paper, as a collection of cells on a grid. The idea intrigued von Neumann, who drew it up creating the first of the devices later termed cellular automaton.

Another improvement was brought by mathematician, John Conway. He constructed the well-known game of life. Unlike von Neumann's machine, Conway's Game of Life operated by tremendously simple rules in a virtual world in the form of 2-dimensional checkerboard.

The birth of agent based model as the model for social system was primarily brought by a computer scientist, Craig Reynolds. He tried to model the reality of lively biological agents, known as the artificial life, a term coined by Christopher Langton.

The ideas of the artificial life has emerged the idea to analyze the social system in the similar computational way. The term for this study is the artificial society, a term coined by Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell. Eventually, the artificial society has given a new collor to the sociological analysis, the computational sociology. The main issue is brought by the problem of classical sociology, the macro-micro linkage problem. As originally questioned by French Sociologist, Émile Durkheim, how individual levels of social system influence and be influenced by the macrosocial level.

The artificial society has been widely accepted by recent sociology as a promising method characterized by the extensive use of computer programs and computer simulations which include evolutionary algorithms (EA), genetic algorithms (GA), genetic programming (GP), memetic programming (MP), agent based models, and cellular automaton (CA).

For many, artificial society is a meeting point for people from many other more traditional fields in the interdisciplinary research, such as linguistics, physics, mathematics, philosophy, computer science, biology, and sociology in which unusual computational and theoretical approaches that would be controversial within their home discipline can be discussed. As a field, it has had a controversial history; some have characterized it as "practical theology" or a "fact-free science". However, the recent publication of artificial society articles in the scientific journals e.g.: Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulations and Journal of Social Complexity shows that artificial life techniques are becoming somewhat more accepted in the sociological mainstream.

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