2018/04/15 by Philip Feldman, Feldman, Philip, Aaron Dant +3
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #FOS: Computer and information sciences #H.1.2 #H.3.3 #H.5.3 #I.2.11 #Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1804.05409
openalex publication_date 2018/04/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In the parable of Simon's Ant, an ant follows a complex path along a beach on to reach its goal. The story shows how the interaction of simple rules and a complex environment result in complex behavior. But this relationship can be looked at in another way - given path and rules, we can infer the environment. With a large population of agents - human or animal - it should be possible to build a detailed map of a population's social and physical environment. In this abstract, we describe the development of a framework to create such maps of human belief space. These maps are built from the combined trajectories of a large number of agents. Currently, these maps are built using multidimensional agent-based simulation, but the framework is designed to work using data from computer-mediated human communication. Maps incorporating human data should support visualization and navigation of the "plains of research", "fashionable foothills" and "conspiracy cliffs" of human belief spaces.