On the dynamics of communication and cooperation in artificial societies

This paper compares two fundamental building blocks of complex interaction-based systems: communication and cooperation. We investigate the effectiveness of communication in an environment where the need for cooperation is scalable as well as the available resources. Several aspects of communication are considered: firstly, we compare a centralized with a decentralized communication protocol; secondly, we compare a population that always communicates with one where the entities can (evolutionary) learn to communicate. This work is part of a larger project whose main goal is to investigate the emergence of cooperation and communication in response of (scalable) environmental challenges. Our application context is an artificial society, i.e., a simulation of a societal system that was inspired by the classical SUGARSCAPE that embodies a bottom-up approach to investigate complex effects that do not necessarily have complex causes. Copyright © 2005 S. Karger AG.