Techreport,
Agent-Based Social Simulation: Dealing with Complexity
Working Paper, Centre for Research on Social Simulation University of Surrey, Guildford, (December 2004)
Abstract
While the idea of computer simulation has had enormous influence on most areas of
science, and even on the public imagination through its use in computer games such
as SimCity, it took until the 1990s for it to have a significant impact in the social
sciences. The breakthrough came when it was realised that computer programs offer
the possibility of creating `artificial' societies in which individuals and collective
actors such as organisations could be directly represented and the effect of their
interactions observed. This provided for the first time the possibility of using
experimental methods with social phenomena, or at least with their computer
representations; of directly studying the emergence of social institutions from
individual interaction; and of using computer code as a way of formalising dynamic
social theories. In this chapter, these advances in the application of computer
simulation to the social sciences will be illustrated with a number of examples of
recent work, showing how this new methodology is appropriate for analysing social
phenomena that are inherently complex, and how it encourages experimentation and
the study of emergence.
