Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Communication models

[Steve Railsback]

Darren Schreiber wrote:
> I am going to be writing a chapter on agent-based modeling for an edited 
> volume in the field of communications.  I immediately thought of Paul 
> Johnson's model from "Political Disagreement" and Axelrod's "Culture 
> Model" as examples.  Can anyone else suggest models in which 
> communication is a central mechanism of concern or of which it is the 
> phenomena being studied?  I realize that this is a wide net, but I am 
> interested to see what else is out there.

Hi Darren,

Volker Grimm and I discuss what we call "interaction" in ecological 
ABMs, in Chapter 5 of our book (which is just leaving the printing plant 
and should be in distribution in a few days). In writing the section, I 
posted a similar enquiry here. The key examples I got in response were:

Axelrod, R., R. L. Riolo, and M. D. Cohen. 2001. Beyond geography: 
cooperation with persistent links in the absense of clustered 
neighborhoods. Personality and Social Psychology Review 6:341-346.

Cohen, M. D., R. L. Riolo, and R. Axelrod. 2001. The role of social 
structure in the maintenance of cooperative regimes. Rationality and 
Society 13:5-32.

Gmytrasiewicz, P. J., and E. H. Durfee. 2001. Rational communication in 
multi-agent environments. Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems 4:272.

Nowak, M. A., and K. Sigmund. 1998. Evolution of indirect reciprocity by 
image scoring. Nature, 393, 573–577.

We discussed 3 kinds of interaction or communication: (1) Direct, when 
agents directly exchange information with each other (or fight or kill 
each other...), (2) Mediated, in which communication is via consumption 
or production of a shared resource, and (3) Interaction fields, where 
agents respond to the combined effects of multiple neighbors.

Steve