Reverse Engineering of Societies - a biological perspective
CPM Report No.: 00-60
By: Kerstin Dautenhahn
Date: 2nd May 2000
A Paper at: The "Starting from
Society" symposium at ASIB'2000
convention, Birmingham University, 16th-19th April 2000.
Also published as:
Kerstin Dautenhahn (2000), "Reverse Engineering of Societies - a biological
perspective", in the Proceedings of the AISB'00 Symposium on Starting from
Society - the Application of Social Analogies to Computational Systems,
Birmingham, UK: AISB, 15-20. (ISBN 1 902956 13 8)
Abstract
This paper reviews important concepts from biology, Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence
and relates them to research into synthesising societies. We distinguish between different types
of animal and human societies and discuss the notion of social intelligence. Consequences of
social embeddedness for modelling societies at different levels of social organisation and control
are elaborated. We distinguish between simulation models of societies and the synthesis of
artificial societies. We explain why the Artificial Life bottom-up approach is the most promising
direction for reverse engineering of societies. The correspondence between synthesised
societies and natural (human, animal) societies is investigated, presenting a hierarchy of
synthesised societies with increasing indistinguishability between synthesised and human
societies.
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