WHEN unwanted email first came along, people invented different words for it, such as unsolicited email and junk email. But eventually "spam" became the word of choice to describe the phenomenon.
It's a process that happens each time a new thing needs a name, but language researchers have struggled to model how it happens without a central decision maker. Now a computer model shows the process at work - and may give insights into how the first human languages emerged.
Luc Steels of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris in France and his colleagues studied the "naming game", a simple computer model that reflects how people invent words and use them. In the game, a group of "agents" live in a virtual environment with a number of "objects". Each agent makes up random names for the objects, and the agents then interact in pairs, trying to "talk" about those objects. ...
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