If there's one thing that social scientists, economists and policy-makers would give their eye teeth for, it's finding out how large-scale social patterns arise. Behavioural economist Joshua Epstein thinks he's getting closer to understanding such dynamics by building rich models that represent how people act, and how their interactions translate into wide-scale change. As he tells Liz Else, he's applying this approach to myriad problems, from how to minimise deaths in a flu pandemic, to uncovering the fate of lost cultures - and even to "growing" the Ten Commandments from scratch.
How does your work differ from what other modellers have been trying to do for years?
We create artificial societies of individual "agents" who behave like simple but plausible humans. We can simulate large numbers of people who differ from each other in various ways - their rules of behaviour, information, genetics and ethnic identities - and who interact ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.