Social Simulation

Social simulation began with Axelrod's investigation of the iterated prisoner's dilemma [8]. The prisoner's dilemma is a two player game which, when extended to an arbitrary length of time unknown to the players, forms a basis for discussing strategies of cooperation. Since then, social simulation has been used to model a number of social issues. This shows that it is possible to draw conclusions about real life social interactions from artificial simulations. A key advantage to social simulation is that experimentation can be performed that's impossible or unethical in real life situations.