Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14)

by John H. Miller

In general, communication is capable of productively altering the interactions in a social system for a few key reasons. First, communication expands the behavioral repertoire of the agents, allowing new and potentially productive forms of interaction to prevail. With communication, agents can create new actions that allow them to escape the previous behavioral bounds. The greater the potential of communication, proxied in our discussion by processing ability and tokens, the more possibilities that emerge. Second, communication emerges as a mechanism that allows an agent to differentiate “self” from “other.” In the worlds we have explored, agents would like to cooperate in the case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and hunt stag in the case of the Stag Hunt, but the presence (and inherent incentives) of defectors is an ever present danger to adopting such behavior. Communication emerges as a way either to signal a willingness to be nice or to detect meanness. In these systems, this occurs when a fortuitous mutation gives an agent the ability to “speak” and to respond positively to such communication while avoiding harm from those agents that say nothing. By detecting “self” in such a way, the agent can improve its performance even in nasty worlds.