Carlos Gershenson

Artificial Societies of Intelligent Agents: Virtual Experiments of Individual and Social Behaviour Carlos Gershenson

In this book we use artificial societies to understand and simulate adaptive behaviour and social processes. We obtain this in three parallel ways: First, we present a behaviours production system capable of reproducing a high number of properties of adaptive behaviour and of exhibiting emergent lower cognition. Second, we introduce a simple model for social action, obtaining emergent complex social processes from simple interactions of imitation and induction of behaviours in agents. And third, we present our approximation to a behaviours virtual laboratory, integrating our behaviours production system and our social action model in virtual animats. Before presenting our proposals, we make an introduction to artificial intelligence and behaviour-based systems, and also we give notions of complex systems and artificial societies. Finally, we discuss about the role of adaptive behaviour for understanding cognition and its evolution.