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februari 05, 2004
Physics of Society
Via Explikation hittades Guardian Unlimited-artikeln Futurology gets a little more exact som beskriver "physics of society", olika modeller för att förklara samhällsfenomen, bland annat agentbaserade. (Explikation gör även en jämförelse med Asimons psykohistoria, vilken läs.)
Ett utdrag ur artikeln:
In the past few years, physicists have started applying their ideas to the social sciences in an attempt to figure out whether there exists a "physics of society". At the same time, social and political scientists have begun to adopt some of the methods pioneered in physics to understand and predict the behaviour of large groups of people. Unlikely as it might sound, there are signs that aspects of social behaviour follow mathematical laws akin to those obeyed by insensate matter in the physical sciences.
...
Social physics won't solve all of society's problems, but it might provide a more rational basis for making social decisions. It can be hard to predict the effect of particular laws and policies once they are unleashed on a highly interactive population. By using agent-based modelling, and by understanding the analogies that such models often show with behaviour seen in physics, it might become possible to base some of those decisions on more than wishful thinking or dodgy statistics. In other words, it might become easier to anticipate the kinds of society that might result from certain choices. The hardest issue, of course - and here physics can offer no help - is to decide what kind of society we want in the first place.
Artikeln avslutas med en kort presentation av artikelförfattaren Philip Ball där det nämns att denne kommit ut med en ny bok Critical Mass vars underrubrik varierar. I artikeln är den "the Physics of Society", på Amazon står det "How One Thing Leads to Another".
Ett utdrag ur boken finns hos Random House.
Se även Seminar Notes On 'The Physics of Institutions' (PDF) av Philip Ball och Paul Ormerod, som handlar om samma saker som i boken. Bilder saknas tyvärr
Abstract: Philip Ball traces the development of statistical physics, first proposed by James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzman and shows how its principles can be used to understand human systems. He shows how rules of interaction between agents can give rise to such phenomena as phase change and self organised criticality and looks at the use of such models for understanding traffic states and the evolution of business organisations, as well as other social science issues such as the effect of social forces on marriage. Paul Ormerod looks at models used to tackle racial segregation, financial markets and crime studies and suggests how powerful insights into the aggregate properties of human organisations can be gained using quite simple agent characterisation and rules of interaction.
Posted by hakank at februari 5, 2004 10:12 FM Posted to Agentbaserad modellering | Dynamiska system | Komplexitet/emergens