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Abstract:
The first part of the talk gives an overview about the
socionics initiative which has been established by the German Research
Foundation (DFG) about three years ago. In this initiative eight project
cooperating in a tandem-structure with at least one partner from Computer
Science and one from Sociology in each "tandem project". Socionics
aims on the one hand at developing computer technologies by employing paradigms
of our social world, on the other hand computer science techniques are used to
develop and validate social theories. A third aspect of socionics is the study
of hybrid systems which consist of real social actors (e.g., humans) and
artificial actors (e.g., software agents). The second part of the talk focuses
on our own project where the central metaphor is "the complex agent". I
will present latest results from two lines of research we are following:
(1) An architecture to build ``realistic'' agents for
modeling social actors.
This architecture allows to integrate different actor
models, such as the homo sociologicus or the homo economics (rational
man), and to switch between these models smoothly.
(2) Models of learning and reflexive
agents.
An important aspect of "realistic"
agents as models of social actors is their ability to predict the behavior of
their environment, to learn, and to consider that their own action is predicted
by other actors (reflexivity). In this line of research we have developed a
model which uses genetic programming (GP) as a learning mechanism, and a model
of the "situation of double contingency" introduced by Luhmann as an
explanation for the origin of social order where learning and reflexivity plays
an important role. |