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we test its dynamics against social science expectations in Section 5. Finally, we
conclude this article with discussions about applications and future work.
2 A Method to Build Evolving Societies
We define a methodology to build societies which can dynamically expand them-
selves with new organizations in order to cope with social issues caused by
changes in the environment or within the society itself. Moreover, we want these
organizations to be created from bottom-up: to emerge from individual percep-
tions and actions and without exogenous trigger. In this section, we illustrate
our method using the first transition of the model as an example. In this transi-
tion a tribal society is confronted with an increase in the number of fights. This
triggers the creation of a police-like organization to prevent them.
Organizations are defined by the triple
(purpose, cost, effect)
.
purpose
de-
termines the preconditions needed to create the organization.
cost
determines
organizational costs.
effect
represents the influence of this organization on the
society. In this bottom-up approach, one of the effects is the enforcement of indi-
vidual behaviors
b
aiming at solving the purpose. Organizations can also be used
as blackboxes in using wide range of effects (e.g. costs 10 units of resource and
reduces the fight variable by 10%). Moreover, organizations may hold internal
dynamics, in order to be able to tune their effect and their costs with regard to
the environment and their purpose (e.g. an increase of the purpose leads to an
increase of the organizational size).
The method relies on this sequence of steps: (1) A global problem which is
observed by the individual variable
o
[0
,
1] affects individuals (step 1).
o
in-
creases when the problem is frequently observed by an agent. Thus,
o
collectively
increases when the problem affects the collectivity (e.g. fights become frequent).
(2) This observation is reported to the rest of the society via a social merg-
ing mechanism
m
∈
[0
,
1].
m
increases when
o
collectively increases. Various
solutions exist to represent
m
, (e.g. a vote, a petition, a strike action). Simple
computer-oriented solutions can also be selected (e.g. averaging
o
). (3) If the
problem observed by
m
is important enough to meet the
purpose
of the organi-
zation
O
and the society can afford the
cost
of
O
(e.g. feeding policemen), then
O
is created (a police). The
effect
of
O
is applied, enforcing a problem-solving
individual behavior
b
(e.g. the protection behavior). The indirect effect is the
resolution of the problem and the cost to hire individuals performing
b
.(4)
b
should reduce the problem triggering
o
(e.g. violence decreases) and thus
m
(e.g.
people feel safer). Note that organizations can rely on
m
as a performance in-
dicator to determine if their effect should be amplified, reduced or kept stable
while keeping the cost as minimal as possible. (5) Finally,
O
is removed if the
problem is do not occur (
purpose
and
effect
are both low) or if the cost cannot be
afforded. A diagram of the organization creation process is presented in Figure
1 using the MASQ formalism [9].
In this method, the emergence of an organization is endogenous: it is the
consequence of agent-level parameters. There is no external trigger that directly
creates the organization.
∈
