Understanding Complex Social Dynamics: A Plea For Cellular Automata Based Modelling

The article argues that using cellular automata (CA) is a promising modelling approach to understand social dynamics. The first section introduces and illustrates the concept of CA. Section 2 gives a short history of CA in the social sciences. Section 3 describes and analyses a more complicated model of evolving support networks. The final section summarises the advantages of the CA approach.

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