Artificial Life Meets Anthropology: A Case of Aggression in Primitive Societies

Abstract

Abstract.One of the greatest challenges in the modern biological and social sciences has been to understand the evolution of altruistic and cooperative behaviors. General outlines of the answer to this puzzle are currently emerging as a result of developments in the evolutionary theories of multilevel selection, cultural group selection, and strong reciprocity. In spite of the progress in theory there is shortage of studies devoted to the connection of theoretical results to the real social systems. This paper presents the model of cooperation which is based on assumptions of heritable markers, constrained resource, and local interactions. Verification of model's predictions with the real data on aggression in archaic egalitarian societies has demonstrated that initial modeling assumptions are acceptable as major factors of social evolution for these societies.

A Sustainable Ecosystem through Emergent Cooperation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

“…The authors compare this to cheating. Computational analysis by Burtsev (2005) found that resource supply influences the rate of peaceful cooperation versus aggression. Further, Tanabe and Masuda (2012) argue that RL is able to learn cooperation through natural selection, showing the Baldwin effect.…”

Aggressive and peaceful behavior in multiagent systems on cellular space

“…An Agent-based lattice foraging model with possible predator-prey behavior that resembles classical artificial life models [2,3,4] was developed in this work. This model could be considered as modification or replication of Burtsev cellular automata model [5] because of slight difference in their architectures.…”

“…For experiments in second case, results are divided in situations when agent cannot satisfy himself with resource by staying in one cell permanently and when agents fill all space (Nc -count of cells in environment) but cannot share cell resources with anyone other. For results that respond to third configuration agent count dynamic firstly has behavior of second situation in second configuration and then «switches» to behavior of first situation [3].…”

“…The methodology of Multi-Agent simulations are broadly used in the study of ecological complexity. Popularity of multi-agent approach springs from the early researches such as Sugarspace [1], Bugs [2] and Polyworld [3] models. One of the pioneer model of Artificial Ecology is a model of bugs on spatial lattice that was proposed by Norman H. Packard [2] denotes the importance of shift from extrinsic to intrinsic adaptation approaches in modeling of evolutionary processes.…”

“…In particular study phenotype is presented as agent strategy -a set of agent's actions performed in hypothetical model situation. Michael Burtsev proposed model that resembles pioneer Artificial Life's Polyworld [3] and Bugs [2] models: the agents with simple behavior are acting in a simple space. In [4] author develops latter models introducing kinship and using artificial neural network as basis of agent's actions.…”