Ex Machina: Coevolving Machines and the Origins of the Social Universe

If we could rewind the tape of the Earths deep history back to the beginning and start the world anew-would social behavior arise yet again?While the study of origins is foundational to many scientific fields such as physics and biology it has rarely been pursued in the social sciences. Yet knowledge of somethings origins often gives us new insights into the present.In Ex Machina John H. Miller introduces a methodology for exploring systems of adaptive interacting choice-making agents and uses this approach to identify conditions sufficient for the emergence of social behavior. Miller combines ideas from biology computation game theory and the social sciences to evolve a set of interacting automata from asocial to social behavior.Readers will learn how systems of simple adaptive agents-seemingly locked into an asocial morass-can be rapidly transformed into a bountiful social world driven only by a series of small evolutionary changes. Such unexpected revolutions by evolution may provide an important clue to the emergence of social life.