Long-range interactions in Sznajd consensus model

The traditional Sznajd model, as well as its Ochrombel simplification, for opinion spreading are modified to have a convincing strength proportional to a negative power of the spatial distance. We find the usual phase transition in the full Sznajd model, but not in the Ochrombel simplification. We also mix the two rules, which favours a phase transition.Comment: Not ye4t submittted, waiting for your comments; 6 page

Sociophysics Simulations I: Language Competition

Using a bit-string model similar to biological simulations, the competition between different languages is simulated both without and with spatial structure. We compare our agent-based work with differential equations and the competing bit-string model of Kosmidis et al.Comment: 8th Granada Seminar (sociophysics); for AIP Conf. Proc. (8 pages incl. figs

Monte Carlo simulation of the rise and the fall of languages

Similar to biological evolution and speciation we define a language through a string of 8 or 16 bits. The parent gives its language to its children, apart from a random mutation from zero to one or from one to zero; initially all bits are zero. The Verhulst deaths are taken as proportional to the total number of people, while in addition languages spoken by many people are preferred over small languages. For a fixed population size, a sharp phase transition is observed: For low mutation rates, one language contains nearly all people; for high mutation rates, no language dominates and the size distribution of languages is roughly log-normal as for present human languages. A simple scaling law is valid.Comment: 8 pages including all figs., for IJMPC. New version with new results at en