This paper presents a evolutionary simulation where the presence of 'tags' and an inbuilt specialisation in terms of skills result in the development of 'symbiotic' sharing within groups of individuals with similar tags. It is shown that the greater the number of possible sharing occasions there...

We consider here issues of open access to social simulations, with a particular focus on software licences, though also briefly discussing documentation and archiving. Without any specific software licence, the default arrangements are stipulated by the Berne Convention (for those countries...

The paper investigates what is meant by "good science" and "bad science" and how these differ as between the natural (physical and biological) sciences on the one hand and social sciences on the other. We conclude on the basis of historical evidence that the natural science are much more heavily...

The objectives of this paper are to define and classify different types of errors and artefacts that can appear in the process of developing an agent-based model, and to propose activities aimed at avoiding them during the model construction and testing phases. To do this in a structured way, we...

Science is the result of a substantially social process. That is, science relies on many inter-personal processes, including: selection and communication of research findings, discussion of method, checking and judgement of others' research, development of norms of scientific behaviour,...

It is argued that due to the complexity of most economic phenomena, the chances of deriving correct models from a priori principles are small. Instead are more descriptive approach to modelling should be pursued. Agent-based modelling is characterised as a step in this direction. However many...

Paper journals use a small number of trusted academics to select information on behalf of all their readers. This inflexibility in the selection was justified due to the expense of publishing. The advent of cheap distribution via the internet allows a new trade-off between time and expense and...

In this paper we propose a methodology to help analyse tendencies in MAS to complement those of simple inspection, Monte Carlo and syntactic proof. We suggest an architecture that allows an exhaustive model-based search of possible system trajectories in significant fragments of a MAS using...