---
id: media/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
relations:
  - predicate: made_by
    target: people/robert-axtell
  - predicate: made_by
    target: people/joshua-epstein
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
---
Sugarscape is a landscape on which simple agents search for sugar. Each has a little vision and a metabolism, and dies when its sugar runs out. From those rules alone the simulations produce seasonal migration, skewed wealth distributions, tribes, war, and population booms and crashes. Add a second resource and trade and markets appear.

This is an agent-based model: a simulation built from many individual actors, each following its own rules. [Epstein](/people/joshua-epstein/) and [Axtell](/people/robert-axtell/) present it as a first step towards a social science that grows its phenomena from the bottom up, instead of fitting equations to aggregates.

The book came out of the 2050 Project on sustainable development. The Brookings Institution, the Santa Fe Institute and the World Resources Institute ran that project jointly. Brookings published the book with MIT Press.

Every twin that populates a place with individual actors descends from Sugarscape. The book is short and concrete. It shows what emergence, large patterns arising from many small interactions, looks like in a spatial model.