BEng thesis published: Artificial Societies of Intelligent Agents

My BEng thesis (from 2001) was just published as a book. You can order a hardcopy at Amazon.com. It is still available electronically in pdf and html.




Gershenson, C. (2010). Artificial Societies of Intelligent Agents: Virtual Experiments of Individual and Social Behaviour. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, ISBN 3838357736.



Summary: In this book we use artificial societies to understand and simulate adaptive behaviour and social processes. We obtain this in three parallel ways: First, we present a behaviours production system capable of reproducing a high number of properties of adaptive behaviour and of exhibiting emergent lower cognition. Second, we introduce a simple model for social action, obtaining emergent complex social processes from simple interactions of imitation and induction of behaviours in agents. And third, we present our approximation to a behaviours virtual laboratory, integrating our behaviours production system and our social action model in virtual animats. Before presenting our proposals, we make an introduction to artificial intelligence and behaviour-based systems, and also we give notions of complex systems and artificial societies. Finally, we discuss about the role of adaptive behaviour for understanding cognition and its evolution.

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