Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell (1996), Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up. Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press.

Growing Artificial Societies is an early collection of agent-based models where complex aggregate behavior is derived from the interactions of simple agents. It is not the first implementation of this paradigm, but it is the most famous in social science.

This page collects and makes any computer code publicly available, that implements, re-interprets and applies the models of Growing Artificial Societies. Please feel free to contribute by sending your code to Guido Fioretti:   myname.mysurname THEUSUALTHING unibo.it

1. The original code is no longer available at the site of The Brookings Institution, but Luc Girardin included it in a collection of Computational Models of Social Systems. If you wish to modify the code, Valeria Baldelli contributed the following tips:

   • Download the above code in Eclipse workspace;
   • Add the following external archives: QTJava.zip and collections.zip from workspace/Ascape/lib;
   • Create a package "edu.brook.sugarscape" in "src";
   • Copy the source code in this package and make your modifications;
   • Delete the old "edu.brook.sugarscape" from "ascape.models.jar";
   • Run your project with main class edu.brook.ascape.model.Scape.

 

2. Francois Bousquet reproduced the models of Growing Artificial Societies within the CORMAS project.

 

3. Some of the models of Growing Artificial Societies has been reproduced on the NetLogo platform. Two models are available:

   • The Wealth Distribution model by Uri Wilenski;
   • The Sugarscape model by Owen Densmore.

 

4. A. Kannankeril is leading an open-source project for translating the models of Growing Artificial Societies in Java. Visit the project Growing Artificial Societies: Sugarscape.

 

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