Agent-Based Evolving Societies - Advances in Social Simulation - page 280

Agent-Based Evolving Societies

Loıs Vanhee 1 , 2 , Jacques Ferber 1 , and Frank Dignum 2

1 LIRMM, University of Montpellier II, France
[e-mail]
2 Utrecht Universiteit, The Netherlands
[e-mail] , [e-mail]

Abstract. This paper describes a method to build artificial societies
that are capable of expanding themselves from bottom-up in order to
adapt to changes occurring in the environment. These changes trigger
social issues at the individual level which are reported at the global
level. Then, the society expands itself with an organization enforcing
individual behavior that copes with the issue.
We apply this method to model the first stages of human societies.
These stages are confronted with dramatic changes in the population
size. These changes lead to the creation of social-control organizations
to face the evolution from a familial tribe, to an autocratic chiefdom to
finally reach a bureaucratic state.

Keywords: Methodologies for MABS, Social Simulation, Simulating
Social Complexity.

1 Introduction

How can a society become aware of global problem and decide to solve it from
bottom up? A simple solution consists in expanding itself with new organiza-
tions. Thus, firehouses are created to solve the problem of frequent fires. But,
these firehouses do not raise from the ground by themselves: they result from a
collective sense of the problem and a global decision to create this organization.
This paper proposes a simple method to design agents that can collectively ex-
pand their society with new organizations in order to cope with social problems.
In particular, we want organizations emerge from endogenous social interaction,
without requiring external triggers.
We demonstrate how to use this method in modeling the first stages of human
development inspired by social theories [2,3,7,8]. These theories describe describe
how tribal societies evolve into chiefdoms and states. According to them, one of
the keys of social development lies in the emergence of social control organiza-
tions. For instance, the transformation of a tribe into a chiefdom is initiated by
the increase of violent conflicts within the society, resulting from looser family
bonds due to population growth. These fights are prevented by the emergence
of a social control organization: a police, which lead by a chief.
In Section 2, we present the method to design our extensible societies. Then,
in Section 3, we detail the social science theories and computer science models
we were inspired by. In Section 4, we present the model of our simulation and