19,742 research outputs found
Evolutionary Games and Computer Simulations
The prisoner's dilemma has long been considered the paradigm for studying the
emergence of cooperation among selfish individuals. Because of its importance,
it has been studied through computer experiments as well as in the laboratory
and by analytical means. However, there are important differences between the
way a system composed of many interacting elements is simulated by a digital
machine and the manner in which it behaves when studied in real experiments. In
some instances, these disparities can be marked enough so as to cast doubt on
the implications of cellular automata type simulations for the study of
cooperation in social systems. In particular, if such a simulation imposes
space-time granularity, then its ability to describe the real world may be
compromised. Indeed, we show that the results of digital simulations regarding
territoriality and cooperation differ greatly when time is discrete as opposed
to continuous.Comment: 8 pages. Also available through anonymous ftp from parcftp.xerox.com
in the directory /pub/dynamics as pdilemma.p
A guided tour of asynchronous cellular automata
Research on asynchronous cellular automata has received a great amount of
attention these last years and has turned to a thriving field. We survey the
recent research that has been carried out on this topic and present a wide
state of the art where computing and modelling issues are both represented.Comment: To appear in the Journal of Cellular Automat
Going through Rough Times: from Non-Equilibrium Surface Growth to Algorithmic Scalability
Efficient and faithful parallel simulation of large asynchronous systems is a
challenging computational problem. It requires using the concept of local
simulated times and a synchronization scheme. We study the scalability of
massively parallel algorithms for discrete-event simulations which employ
conservative synchronization to enforce causality. We do this by looking at the
simulated time horizon as a complex evolving system, and we identify its
universal characteristics. We find that the time horizon for the conservative
parallel discrete-event simulation scheme exhibits Kardar-Parisi-Zhang-like
kinetic roughening. This implies that the algorithm is asymptotically scalable
in the sense that the average progress rate of the simulation approaches a
non-zero constant. It also implies, however, that there are diverging memory
requirements associated with such schemes.Comment: to appear in the Proceedings of the MRS, Fall 200
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