Bruce Edmonds, Cesareo Hernandez, Klaus Troitzsch (eds): Social Simulation Technologies, Advances and New Discoveries
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Bruce Edmonds, Cesareo Hernandez, Klaus Troitzsch (eds): Social Simulation Technologies, Advances and New Discoveries IGI Global, 2007, 378 pp, $180,00, ISBN-10: 1599045222, ISBN-13: 978-1599045221 Walter Quattrociocchi Published online: 10 June 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2008
Why reviewing a book on social simulation? Modelling and Simulating complex phenomena is a task that, during the last years, is more and more growing attention from different scientific fields thanks also to the availability of new instruments and approaches. Our world is populated with complex independent entities which interact in complex ways; in many cases the interaction between entities cannot be sufficiently modelled without including a large amount of details. The agent based simulation approach to modelling allows to more efficiently design interacting entities than equation based, statistical or other methodologies in use. In particular, social simulation can be seen as a more detailed modelling approach which has the useful capability to divide and represent phenomena into separate but interacting chunks (Edmonds 2003). In this book the authors present a selection of research papers from the field of social simulation providing to researchers, scholars and business men a good and complete overview on the state of the art in this growing and fascinating field. The fusion of computational models and social sciences in the early 1960s states the beginning of social simulation. The first models found in literature explore the passage of units through queues and processes in order to predict some outcomes, for example, the waiting time for customers in a queue or the time to solve an emergency. These models are typically based on System Dynamics. The early works focus their attentions on the predicting tasks, while later the interests of social sciences moved to the understanding and explanation of phenomena.
W. Quattrociocchi (&) LABSS, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
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Logic based and cognitive science approaches have considerably contributed to developments of multi agent based simulation, whit social sciences playing a lesser role. Exceptions are economics and game theory, which have rapidly invaded this field (e conte R 1988). Agent Based Social Simulation (ABSS) consists of designing interacting artificial agents to model artificial societies in order to observe and explain behaviors at both macro and micro level, from individuals up to systems of individuals. The Social Sciences develop theories of social phenomena and ABSS provides models and tools to study these phenomena. The methodology follows a first step focused on the theorization of social phenomena; in the second step computational models and algorithms, based on interaction, are designed and implemented to perform simulations; then the results are explored for understanding and explaining the phenomena and its agreement with the theory. In the preface the editors promote the use of a closely
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