Abstract. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it presents a new system for empirical investigations of evolving agent societies in SugarScapelike environments, which improves existing Sugarscape testbeds. Secondly, we introduce a framework for modelling communication and cooperation in an animal society. In this framework the environmental pressure to communicate and cooper...

In this paper we present a new technique for simulating mega-scale Agent-Based Models (agent population sizes exceeding one million) at interactive rates. We achieve this performance by leveraging the computing power of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). To test our system, we implemented SugarScape, a simple model with many common ABM features. We are able to achieve over 50 updates per second ...

The defining feature of agent-based models is precisely that fundamental social structures emerge from the interaction of individual agents. The shorthand for this is that the collective structures grow “from the bottom up.” As a result of research pioneered at SFI, there now exists an impressive— and rapidly growing—population of agent-based models, of coral reefs, ant colonies, bird flocks, f...

Agents within multi-agent simulation environments frequently compete for limited resources, requiring negotiation to resolve ‘conflict’. The negotiation process for resolving conflict often relies on a transactional or serial processes that complicates implementation within a parallel simulation framework. This paper demonstrates how transactional events to resolve competition can be implemente...

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it presents a new software system for empirical investigations of evolving agent societies in SUGARSCAPE-like environments. Second, it introduces a conceptual framework for modeling cooperation in an artificial society. In this framework the environmental pressure to cooperate is controllable by a single parameter, thus allowing systematic inv...

Following the efforts of Axtell, Axelrod, Epstein, and Cohen (1996) to “dock” the Sugarscape model and the Axelrod Culture Model (ACM), the current paper reports the results of a current drive to dock the SimVision and the ORGAHEAD models. Docking is a term coined by Axtell et al. to describe the process by which two models are made to give equivalent results. Establishing equivalence gives the...

In this paper, we propose a multi-agent system (MAS) to simulate a community of beings that move, eat, reproduce, trade and auction, among other activities. We demonstrate how beings using primitive rules result in emerging, non-primitive behavior. Heterogeneity of real world entities is captured by allowing the user to give the beings different biological characteristics (e.g. level of intelli...

Conceptual modelling is the process of abstracting a model from a real or proposed system into a conceptual model. An explicit conceptual model representation allows the model to be communicated and analysed by the stakeholders involved in a simulation project. A good representation that can be understood by all stakeholders is especially essential when the project involves different stakeholde...

In this paper we investigate the effect of life expectancy on risk attitude in an artificial multi-agent world, which is a variant of the sugarscape [2]. Our basic approach is evolutionary in that we encode risk attitude as a gene within the agents that undergoes variation and selection and perform simulations to see the evolved (i.e., presumed optimal) values of this gene/attitude under differ...

In the past tractability issues have generally forced economists to focus their attention on specialized aspects of economic behavior without detailed consideration of psychological cultural demographic and migratory pro cesses The recent development of agent based compu tational frameworks such as the Sugarscape model de veloped by Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell at the Brookings Institution ...