The Archeology of Artificial Societies
CPM Report No.: 00-61
By: Jim Doran
Date: 2nd May 2000A Paper at: The "Starting
from Society" symposium at
ASIB'2000 convention, Birmingham University, 16th-19th April 2000.
Also published as: Jim Doran (2000), "The Archeology
of Artificial Societies", in the Proceedings of the AISB'00 Symposium on
Starting from Society - the Application of Social Analogies to Computational
Systems, Birmingham, UK: AISB, 21-32. (ISBN 1 902956 13 8)
Abstract
Can archaeologists help software engineers unravel what has been happening in an artificial
society of intelligent agents? We discuss the methods that archaeologists regularly use and how
they relate to the properties of an artificial society and the problems faced in recovering its
history. As part of the discussion, an abstract model of a typical artificial society is presented,
the structure of the process of interpreting evidence is analysed, and the particular
macro-social phenomenon of socio-cultural collapse is considered.
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