Cooperation and communication in evolving artificial societies

This work reports on experiments with an artificial society simulation package. 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. The specific goals of the experiments reported here include: 1) the study a number of extensions of the classical SugarScape model; 2) to compare two radically different approaches to communication among the individuals of the population. Our results demonstrate that a number of the presented extensions should be taken up in future experiments in artificial societies, and that the decentralised communication protocol has negative effects on the system behaviour.