Reverse engineering of societies: a biological perspective.

This paper reviews important concepts from biology, Arti cial Life and Arti cial Intelligence and relates them to research into synthesising societies. We distinguish between di erent types of animal and human societies and discuss the notion of social intelligence. Consequences of social embeddedness for modelling societies at di erent levels of social organisation and control are elaborated. We distinguish between simulation models of societies and the synthesis of arti cial societies. We explain why the Arti cial Life bottom-up approach is the most promising direction for reverse engineering of societies. The correspondence between synthesised societies and natural (human, animal) societies is investigated, presenting a hierarchy of synthesised societies with increasing indistinguishability between synthesised and human societies.

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