Within the archeological record for Bronze Age Chinese culture, there continues to be a gap in our understanding of the sudden rise of the Erlitou State from the previous late Longshan chiefdoms. In order to examine this period, I developed and used an agent-based model (ABM) to explore possible socio-politically relevant hypotheses for the gap between the demise of the late Longshan cultures and rise of the first state level society in East Asia. I tested land use strategy making and collective action in response to drought and flooding scenarios, the two plausible environmental hazards at that time. The model results show cases of emergent behavior where an increase in social complexity could have been experienced if a catastrophic event occurred while the population was sufficiently prepared for a different catastrophe, suggesting a plausible lead for future research into determining the life of the time period.

The ABM published here was originally developed in 2016 and its results published in the Proceedings of the 2017 Winter Simulation Conference.

The code for the paper “Social norms and the dominance of Low-doers”

This is a model of a community of online communities. Using mechanisms such as win-stay, lose-shift, and preferential attachment the model can reproduce similar patterns to those of the Stack Exchange network.

A model that strips trade down to its core to explore foundational emergent behaviour and evolution in trade systems.

This is the Toy Trader but with two additional goods being traded.

This model reproduces the double auction experiments and explores the difference between short-term and long-term trading and pricing.

This model test the efficiency of the market economy in comparison with a hunter/gatherer economy. It also compares the model outcomes between a market economy when using eternal agents with one using mortal agents.

This is a modification of the RobbyGA model by the Santa Fe Institute (see model Info tab for full information). The basic idea is that the GA has been changed to one where the agents have a set lifetime, anyone can reproduce with anyone, but where there is a user-set amount of ‘starvation’ that kills the agents that have a too low fitness.

This model is a modification of Metaphoria 2019, where the monetary system can be run with agents that do not die, but their characteristics are mutated as they are in the mortal population.

This is a modification of Metaphoria 2019 so that the eternal population is subjected to all the evolutionary forces as the mortal population.