---
id: books/growing-artificial-societies
about:
  label: Growing Artificial Societies
  description: >-
    Epstein and Axtell's 1996 Sugarscape experiments, which showed how
    migration, inequality, trade and conflict can grow from simple agents on a
    landscape; the founding book of agent-based social simulation.
  tags:
    - agent-based
    - sugarscape
    - emergence
    - social simulation
    - history
book:
  authors:
    - Joshua M. Epstein
    - Robert Axtell
  publisher: Brookings Institution Press and MIT Press
  year: 1996
  isbn: '9780262550253'
  url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL39140744W'
domains:
  - people
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: >-
        Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up - Joshua
        M. Epstein, Robert Axtell - Google Books
      url: 'https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9780262550253'
    - title: 'Open Library: Growing Artificial Societies'
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL39140744W'
  created: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
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.