[Squeakland] Making Cultural simulations on Kedama

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

Hi all,

First, thanks for the SqueakFest2006. It was really awesome to be here, 
to know all that squeakers, to listen them, and to speak with them (a 
little).  If love is the key to make visitors become residents, thanks 
for such warm act of love in such nice city :)

I'm now getting back to my academical activities and I'm wondering, 
after the speak of Yoshiki,  if Kedama can be used to make cultural 
simulations also (may be you remember that I'm interested in the 
"Cultural Thing" of cognition also). I'm thinking to start with a 
specific simulations showed in the book The Complexity of Cooperation 
from Robert Axelrod. It's about culture dissemination.

Axelrod model different cultures as part of a grid (that where the idea 
of using Kedama come from). Every culture is a cell in that grid and 
every culture has a number of traits (for example 5) wich can have 
different values (lets say 10). What Axelrod says is that when two 
agents (cultures) are similar one to each other (it' means they share 
the same value in the same trait) they have more possibilities to 
interact and become even more similar.

The algorithm is something like this:

Repeat these two steps as much as wanted:

1) Select randomly a culture in the grid and select randomly a neighbor 
of that culture (in such grid neighbors can be on north, south, west or 
est).
2) This two cultures interact with a probability equal to their cultural 
similarity (that is, the number of similar values in the same trait of 
these two cultures). That interaction consist in selecting a trait where 
this two cultures are different and change the value of that trait for 
the value of the neighbor.

The process define a set of culture regions. You can find the source 
code of the implementation of Axelrod's algorithm in:

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/Software/CC/CC7/CULTURE.P.html (<- Pascal version)
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/Software/CC/CC7/FullCulture.p.html (<- Full 
Pascal version)
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/Software/CC/CC7/CULTURE.BAS.html (<- Visual 
Basic version)

¿Do you think is feasible to implement the same model in Kedama? If yes, 
¿Where is the best way to start implementing it?

Thanks a lot,

Offray

Ps: I will be probably on Wikimania next weekend (I have the scholarship 
acceptance and now I'm trying to get the proper permissions in the 
University). So may be we can see there :).



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