Social Simulation - History and Development

History and Development

The history of the agent based model can be traced back to the Von Neumann machine, a theoretical machine capable of reproduction. The device von Neumann proposed would follow precisely detailed instructions to fashion a copy of itself. The concept was then improved by von Neumann's friend Stanislaw Ulam, also a mathematician; Ulam 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 devices later termed cellular automata.

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

The birth of the agent based model as a model for social systems was primarily brought about 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.

Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell developed the first large scale agent model, the Sugarscape, to simulate and explore the role of social phenomena such as seasonal migrations, pollution, sexual reproduction, combat, transmission of disease, and even culture.

Nigel Gilbert published with Klaus G. Troitzsch the first textbook on Social Simulation: Simulation for the Social Scientist (1999) and established its most relevant journal: the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.

More recently, Ron Sun developed methods for basing agent based simulation on models of human cognition, known as cognitive social simulation (see (Sun 2006))