English

Simon's Anthill: Mapping and Navigating Belief Spaces

Multiagent Systems 2018-04-17 v1 Computers and Society

Abstract

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.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.05409,
  title  = {Simon's Anthill: Mapping and Navigating Belief Spaces},
  author = {Philip Feldman and Aaron Dant and Wayne Lutters},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.05409},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Collective Intelligence 2018

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:24:10.198Z