Growing Artificial Societies

Epstein and Axtell built Sugarscape, a landscape on which simple agents with a little vision and a metabolism search for sugar and die when they run out. From those rules alone the simulations produce seasonal migration, skewed wealth distributions, tribes, war, population booms and crashes, and, once a second resource is added, trade and markets. The authors present it as a first step towards a social science that grows its phenomena from the bottom up rather than fitting equations to aggregates. The book came out of the 2050 Project on sustainable development, run jointly by the Brookings Institution, the Santa Fe Institute and the World Resources Institute, and was published by Brookings with MIT Press.

Every twin that populates a place with individual actors is a descendant of Sugarscape. The book is short, concrete and still the clearest demonstration of what emergence in a spatial model looks like and why it is worth having.