War and Peace among Artificial Nations - A Model and Simulation Based on a Two-Layered Multi-agent System

摘要

This paper attempts to model the dynamics of war and peace in a virtual world to deepen our understanding why wars continue arising in spite of many peace keeping efforts. Land is modelled as a toroidal plain divided into square grid. Each nation consists of several villages that own a limited number of adjoining tiles of grids. A nation sometimes invades an adjacent village of another nation and occupies it. Inhabitants in each village consists of farmers, officers, and soldiers. Village can enlarge their territory by developing an empty tile, and can be independent from the nation they currently belong to. Each nation and village have their own meme for decision making that mutates when their successors inherit the strategies. In order to investigate what occurs in the virtual world we built a simulation system with a GUI that facilitates parameter set-up. The results displayed a typical phenomenon: repeated rise and fall of big nations. With other parameter settings, we also observed a period of equilibrium by a number of nations followed by a period of domination by one large ruling nation.