Project Description:
Evolving Artificial Moral Ecologies is an extension of a project started by Peter Danielson some years ago under the title "artificial morality". The emphasis in the current project is more on the payoff driven dynamics of the dissemination of strategies in cultures and biological communities and less on normative decisions of rational agents. The project seeks to extend current work in the evolution of cooperation by the considered inclusion of spatial elements and resource dependency into the models. It also deliberately seeks to integrate agent-based and population approaches to modeling evolutionary processes.
Why put interactive simulators on the Web? For the simple reason that it is more and more the case that cutting-edge research understands the evolution of cooperation in terms of computer models, and the way to understand that understanding is to play with the models involved. It might be better to build your own models (or it might not), but in any case most of us just don't have the time. But descriptions of models are a poor substitute for playing with the models themselves, both in terms of understanding and in terms of "getting into the spirit of the thing".
Currently, the EAME project finds three primary areas of focus.
Education: to put interactive simulators on the web so that non-programmers can get a feel for what lies behind current research in the evolution of unselfish behavior. Some of these simulators illustrate standard models from the literature (e.g., the Skyrms models and the Hegselmann line-cellular automaton) and some are unique to the EAME project (e.g., the agent-patch simulator package).
Research: to use agent-based simulation to extend our understanding of the conditions under which unselfish behavior is stable.
Providing Tools: to present and package the simulators developed for EAME in such a way as to make it easier for other modelers to develop similar models. See notes on simulator design.