Modelling Social Interaction in
Information
Systems (MSIIS)
Lectures: 14 lectures, every Monday at
08:20 to 09:50 between 31/8/15 and 30/11/15
Location: Irinyi 219, University of Szeged.
Lecturer: Dr David Hales (www.davidhales.com)
e-mail: dave@davidhales.com
Course Overview
Computer systems are increasingly distributed. Networks link nodes that
serve users and carry out computations. Collectively, system level
properties emerge rather than being planned. This is similar to how
human and animal societies operate. In human societies individual goals
and behaviours through interaction generate collective properties such
as norms, laws, markets and government. These properties structure and
shape our world. In animal societies evolved behaviours can solve
complex optimisation problems through individual rule following as
evidenced by the social insects (ants, bees and termites).
Recent innovations such as Bittorrent and Bitcoin show how algorithms
developed with reference to social, economic and biological theory can
change not only the computational networks but also society in general.
In this course we will study both theoretical concepts about social
interaction and case studies of successfully deployed systems that
embody them. We will also critically consider a set of techniques used
to understand and research social interaction such as:
Artificial life, game theory, evolution and co-evolution
Agent-based models, cellular automata, complex systems
Cooperation, networks, collective action, big data.
We will also study pioneers in the area such as John Von Neumann,
Herbert Simon, John Holland, Robert Axelrod and others.
We will critically discuss what good models are and how to go about
constructing them. We will also consider some of the historical
theories of social systems as they relate to information systems.
Prerequisites: The course
assumes some programming ability but no specific computer language will
be mandated. It is also assumed that students will be open to ideas
traditionally outside of computer science such as social science and
economics but no prior knowledge will be assumed of these areas.
Assessment: There will be no formal exam. MSc students will be
assessed through a scientific paper reading in which they choose and
read a paper of interest and then present the main ideas from the paper
to the group. In addition to the paper reading PhD students will be
assessed through a simple programming assignment. Specific details
about the assessment process can be found here: MSIIS-Assessment.pdf
Aims (the course aims to):
Give students a broad overview of the ways that social
interaction in both social systems and computer systems can be modelled
and understood.
Equip students with the ability to critically assess existing and
new work within the area of modelling social interaction.
Provide students with historical context covering some of the
motivations, intellectual traditions, seminal works and people
associated with modelling social interaction.
Objectives (by the end of the
course students will be able to):
State several significant techniques used to model social
interaction in information systems.
Understand and describe examples of deployed systems that use
social interaction methods.
Critically assess and describe some of the major published work
from the scientific literature in the area.
Lectures
Lecture slides will be listed here as they are delivered.
Papers and books listed in the slides can be found in the books and
papers sections below the lectures section. Note: the lecture session
scheduled for 30/8/2015 was cancelled hence the first lecture took
place on 7/9/2015. The materials from last year (2014) can be found here.
1. Introduction and Overview:
Aims and objectives of the course; Overview of different kinds of
modelling and different kinds of social interaction; Outline of some
general concepts such as complexity, emergence, self-organisation,
decentralisation power and control. Software NetLogo, Golly. Slides1.pdf
[date: 7/9/2015]
2. Cellular Automata:
History of CA’s their motivations and interpretations; Examples of 1D
and 2D CA’s. People: John von Neumann, Stephen Wolfram, John Conway,
Chris Langdon. Examples: game of life, different 1D CA’s; ideas of
chaos; Idea of Turing complete CA. Software: NetLogo/Life & 1D
CA's, Golly. Slides2.pdf
[date: 14/9/2015]
3. Evolution of cooperation:
Problem of cooperation in general and how it relates to social systems.
Some concepts from game theory. Presentation of the Prisoners’ Dilemma
game. Detailed look at Axelrod's computer tournaments. People Axelrod. Slides3.pdf
[date: 21/9/2015]
4. Bittorrent and cooperation:
Overview of Bittorrent file-sharing protocol; How the protocol relates
to cooperation theory; People: Bram Cohen. Software: Bittorrent. Slides4.pdf
[date: 28/9/2015]
5. Social Welfare and
Bittorrent credit dynamics: Idea of a social welfare function;
some simple examples and the people and ideas that inform them. Rawls'
veil of ignorance. Credit dynamics in a bittorrent private community
(BitCrunch model). People: Bentham, Pareto, Rawls, Sen. Slides5.pdf
[date: 5/10/2015]
6. Evolution, co-evolution
(and artificial life) Part 1: Evolution in general, evolutionary
algorithms, genetic
algorithms, co-evolutionary systems, interaction structures other than
mean-field, concept of an ESS, evolving cooperation on a cellular
automata. People: Dan Dennett, Nowak & May, John Holland. Slides6.pdf
[date: 12/10/2015]
7. Evolution, co-evolution
(and artificial life) Part 2: Games on fixed graphs, cost /
benefit formulation of PD, dynamic interaction structures - evolving
networks of
cooperation, cultural evolution, artificial life, self-replication,
open-ended evolution, emerging agents, bootstrapping evolution. People:
Martin Nowak, Tom Ray, Richard Dawkins, Chris Langton, John Holland. Slides7.pdf
[date: 18/10/2015]
8. Schelling's Segregation
Model: A more detailed look at the segregation model (shown in
lecture 1). Exploring the behaviour of the model systematically. Some
applications of the model in distributed systems design and modelling
of social network evolution. Software: NetLogo/Segregation model.
People: Thomas Schelling. Slides8.pdf
[date: 26/10/2015]
9. Riots, Ethnocentrism and
Sugar: Threshold models, Granovetta's riot model, Watts'
cascades on graphs, artificial socieity models, Ethnocentrism model,
Sugarscape model. Software: Netologo/Ethnocentrism model, Riot model.
People: Mark Granovetta, Duncan Watts, Josh Epstien. Slides9.pdf
[date: 2/11/2015]
10. Markets (and Money): What is a market? Textbook supply /
demand and equilibrium. Real markets. Macro and micro models.
Continuous Double Auction electronic markets, ZIP
(zero-intelligence-plus) algorithmic trader agents. Non-equilibrium
models, speculation, contagion, El Farol Bar, SFI artificial
stock market. Prediction markets. Money - what is it (why don't I have
any)? Modern money, central banks and local banks. Theories of value.
New P2P money. People: Dave Cliff, Brian Arthur. Slides10.pdf
[date: 9/11/2015]
11. Bitcoin, Incentives and
the future: Bitcoin basic architecture, incentive structure, the
block chain, mining, mining pools, staged incentives, problems with
bitcoin, altcoins, future of block chain technology. Software: Bitcoin.
People: Satoshi Nakamoto. Slides11.pdf
[date:16/11/2015]
12. Student paper reading
assignments. Students each give 10 to 15 mins presentation plus
5 mins questions on their chosen paper (max 5 slides if they decide to
use slides). A link to the pdf of the slides and paper will be given
here. Also the papers are listed in the papers section:
13. Student paper reading
assignments. Students each give 10 to 15 mins presentation plus
5 mins questions on their chosen paper (max 5 slides if they decide to
use slides). A link to the pdf of the slides and paper will be given
here. Also the papers are listed in the paper section:
You do not have to read, use or watch all these
things. I
will discuss in the lectures what you might wish to look at. Hence they
a provided as background that allow you explore a topic mentioned in
the lectures that you are interested in.
Books
Gilbert, N., Troitzsch K. G. (2005) Simulation for the social
scientist. Second Edition. Milton Keynes, Open University Press. [a
book about agent-based simulation for social scientists by leaders in
the field who are both sociologists with extensive computer backgrounds]
Flake, G. (1998) The Computational Beauty of Nature. MIT Press.
[nice book on self-organisation and other complexity aspects covered or
touched on in many of the lectures]
Wolfram, S. (2002) A New Kind of Science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram
Media, online at: : http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html
[discussed in lecture 2 on CA's, considered a controversial book by
some, see review in papers section and lecture in video section below]
Poundstone, W. (1993) Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game
Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb. Anchor Books, New York. [history of
the PD game and von Neumann. Very interesting for historical background]
Axelrod, R. (1984) The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books. NY.
[covered in the lecture on the evolution of cooperation. Interesting
discussion of how to apply results gained from computer experiences to
social processes. Highly cited and considered a classic]
Kropotkin, P. (1902) Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.
[intresting critique of "Social Darwinism" of the time. Many biologists
question some of his arguments] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4341
John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern: Theory of Games and
Economic Behavior, Princeton University Press (1944) [the seminal game
theory book]
Ridley, M (1997) The Origins of Virtue. Penguin Books [an idea
about how social systems, norms and "morality" can emerge from selfish
evolution involving
groups]
Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press. [seminal book on modern social contract
theory where rationality becomes a basis for a Just society]
Amartya K. Sen, 1970 [1984], Collective Choice and Social
Welfare, North Holland; Third printing edition. [Nobel prize winner
lays out the relationships between social welfare and many intellectual
traditions and puts his own spin on it]
Rahman, R (2011) Peer-to-Peer System Design: A Socioeconomic
Approach. PhD Theis, University of Delft, Netherlands. [recent PhD
thesis that includes the work discussed in the lectures on credit
dynamics in private bittorrent communities in addition to other work] http://www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/pubs/ph_d/rahman-thesis.pdf
Epstein, Joshua M.; Axtell, Robert (1996). Growing artificial
societies: social science from the bottom up. Brookings Institution
Press [extensive ABM of an artificial society exploring many social
phenoema in an artificial world]
Dennett, D. C., (1987) The Intentional Stance, MIT Press,
(Cambridge) [philosophical but written for a general audience. Argues
for an intrumental view of the notion of intentional systems - if you
read it you will understand what that means]
Wooldridge, Michael (2002). An Introduction to MultiAgent
Systems. John Wiley & Sons. [textbook on MAS - which realtes to
more logical based, intellegent agents applied to engineering
applications]
Daniel Dennett (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Simon &
Schuster [popular book that argues how abstract evolution might explain
the emergence of life, culture, intelligence etc.]
Holland, John (1975). Adaptation in Natural and Artificial
Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [considered the seminal book on
modern GA's. But contains much more including all kinds of ideas
related to artificial life and complex adaptive systems. A classic book]
John Maynard Smith (1982) Evolution and the theory of games.
Oxford University Press [seminal book on the relationship between game
theory and evolution including the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS)
concept]
E. O. Wilson (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. [seminal
book on sociobiology - explaining social behavour with biological
evolution. Perhaps still controversial due to interpreting human
social behaviour in this way]
Koza, J.R. (1992). Genetic Programming: On the Programming of
Computers by Means of Natural Selection, MIT Press. [a standard text on
genetic programming (GP) where programs are evolved to solve problems]
Boyd, R. and P. J. Richerson. 1985. Culture and the Evolutionary
Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [detailed analysis /
math models applying evolutionary approaches directly to culture rather
than biology]
Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University
Press [popular science book describing evolution from a "gene's eye"
perspective. Introduces the word "meme" for cultural replicators]
Holland, John (1998) Emergence: from chaos to order. Perseus
Books
[a book that introduces various ideas about complex adaptive systems
and how they work]
Keynes, John Maynard, (1936) The General Theory of Employment,
Interest and Money, London: Macmillan [considered one of the most
important books in macro economics]
Charles Goodhart (1988) The Evolution of Central Banks. MIT
Press. [a historical and functional view of how and why central banks
emerged and what they do]
W. Brian Arthur (2009) The Nature of Technology: What It Is and
How It Evolves. The Free Press and Penguin Books. [the big picture. By
complexity economics pioneer]
Reynolds, Craig (1987). "Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed
behavioral model.". SIGGRAPH '87: Proceedings of the 14th annual
conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques (Association
for Computing Machinery): 25–34. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~dt/siggraph97-course/cwr87/
Epstein, J. M. (2002) “Modeling civil violence: An
agent-based computational approach”, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, Vol. 99, Suppl. 3, May 14, 2002, and is available
at http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/Epstein.CivilViolence.pdf
Axelrod, R. (1995) Building New Political Actors, in Nigel
Gilbert and Rosaria Conte (eds.), Artificial
Societies: the Computer Simulation of Social Life, London: University
College Press. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/research/Building.pdf
Gray, L. (2003) Book review of "A New Kind of Science by
Stephen Wolfram." Notices of the AMS vol 50 No. 2: http://www.ams.org/notices/200302/fea-gray.pdf
[a critical review of Wolfram's book on CA's]
Hatna and Benenson (2012) The Schelling Model of Ethnic
Residential Dynamics http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/15/1/6.html
[empirical study applying model to residential patterns in Israel - how
convincing is this approach?]
Singh, A. and Haahr, M. (2007) Decentralized clustering in pure
p2p overlay networks using Schelling’s model. In Communications,
ICC’07. IEEE International Conference on, pages 1860–1866. IEEE, 2007. PDF.
[shows how a p2p algorithms was inspired by Schelling's model. Can be a
little confusing in parts]
L Vu, K Nahrstedt, M Hollick (2008) Exploiting Schelling behavior
for improving data accessibility in mobile peer-to-peer networks.
Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Conference on Mobile and
Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking, and Services. http://cairo.cs.uiuc.edu/publications/papers/schelling-camera5.pdf
[here Schelling model is used create a social user model to test mobile
algorithms on]
Henry AD, Prałat P, Zhang CQ (2011) Emergence of
segregation in evolving social networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA
108(21):8605–8610. [a Schelling-like model for the evolution of
segregation on social networks. It's simplified such that results can
be obtained by analysis rather than simulation]
Nash, John (1950) Equilibrium points in n-person games.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 36(1):48-49. http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/events/iap07/Nash-Eqm.pdf
[often cited paper introducing Nash Equilibirum concept - it is quite
mathematical]
Adar & Huberman (2000) Free riding on Gnutella. First Monday,
vol. 5 no.10. http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/792.
[often cited article that emperically measures free riding on a popular
P2P filesharing system of the time]
Cohen, B. (2003) Incentives build robustness in bittorrent, in
1st Workshop on the Economics of Peer-2-Peer Systems. http://www.bittorrent.org/bittorrentecon.pdf
[highly readable overview of BT system by its creator]
Piatek, M. et al (2007) Do incentives build robustness in
BitTorrent? 4th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design &
Implementation (NSDI) http://www.michaelpiatek.com//papers/BitTyrant.pdf
[introduces a BT client variant called BitTyrant that tests the
incentive claims of BT]
Locher, T. et al (2006) Free Riding in BitTorrent is Cheap.
HotNets 2006 http://www.disco.ethz.ch/publications/hotnets06.pdf
[introduces a BT client variant called BitThief to show how to freeride
against other BT clients]
Pouwelse, J. et al (2005) The bittorrent p2p file-sharing system:
measurements and analysis. In Proceedings of the 4th international
conference on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'05), Springer-Verlag, Berlin,
Heidelberg. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.59.3191
[an early BT measurment paper giving detailed analysis of the BT
ecosystem at that time]
Hales, D., Rahman, R., Zhang, B., Meulpolder M., and Pouwelse, J.
(2009) BitTorrent or BitCrunch: Evidence of a credit squeeze in
BitTorrent? Proc. of the 5th Collaborative Peer-to-Peer Systems (COPS)
Workshop http://davidhales.name/papers/bitcrunch-2009.pdf
[credit squeeze model as discussed in one of the lectures]
Rahman, R. and Hales, D., Vinko, T., Pouwelse, J. and Sips, H.
(2010). No more crash or crunch: sustainable credit dynamics in a P2P
community. International Conference on High Performance Computing &
Simulation (HPCS 2010) http://davidhales.name/papers/credit_dynamics.pdf
[elaborated credit dynamics model with both over and under supply of
credit and formal analysis]
Ian A. Kash, John K. Lai, Haoqi Zhang, and Aviv Zohar. (2012).
Economics of BitTorrent communities. In Proceedings of the 21st
international conference on World Wide Web (WWW '12). ACM, New York,
NY, USA http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/events/netecon2011/papers/paper19.pdf
[more recent detailed emprical work and "maco-economic" observations of
credit dynamics in a private BT community]
Hales et al (2013) Agency in complex information systems – Future
research directions. Unpublished draft part of an EU consultation
report from the NESS project (see Annex 1). pdf. [you might find the
annex 1 interesting as a short overview of agents in computer systems.
Also you might find the proposed research areas of interest].
Doran, J. (1995) Simulating Societies using Distributed AI. Paper
Presented at Dagstuhl Seminar on Social Science Microsimulation: A
Challenge to Computer Science, Schloss Dagstuhl, May 1-5, 1995. http://www.agent.ai/doc/upload/200402/dora95_1.pdf
[intresting overview of agent work with good references plus brief
overview of the EOS project]
Nowak, Sigmund, Esam (1995) Automata, repeated games and noise.
J. Math. Biol. 33: 703-722. http://homepage.univie.ac.at/karl.sigmund/JMB95b.pdf
[analysis using replicator theory of evolution of two-state
finite-state machines playing the prisoner's dilemma]
György Szabó & Gábor Fáth (2007)
Evolutionary games on graphs. http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0607344v3.pdf
[large overview of various games, including cooperation games, on
various social structures]
Riolo, R. L., Cohen, M. D., & Axelrod, R. (2001). Evolution
of cooperation without reciprocity. Nature, 414(6862), 441-443.
[tag
model in which agents store a tolerance value so they can match similar
tags rather than only identical ones. Tags are real numbers]
Tom Ray (1992) Evolution, Ecology, and Optimization of Digital
Organisms. Santa Fe Working
Paper: 1992-08-042 [describes the Tierra system in detail,
where program code evolves to compete for processor and memory inside a
virtual machines]
Hales, D. & Arteconi, S. (2006) SLACER: A
Self-Organizing Protocol for Coordination in P2P Networks. IEEE
Intelligent Systems, 21(2):29-35 http://davidhales.com/papers/slacer-final.pdf
[how adapting interaction structure
promotes cooperation]
Hales, D., Shutters, S. (2012). Cooperation through the
endogenous
evolution of social structure. Proceedings of the Complex 2012
conference in Santa Fe, NM. Dec. 5-7th 2012, Springer http://davidhales.com/papers/complex2012.pdf
[overview of a
number of "cultural group selection" models with a focus on my own take
on these models]
Dittrich et al. (2001) Artificial
Chemistries - A Review. Journal of Artificial Life 7: 225–275.
[review of different artificial chemistry models. Also includes Tierra
and some related models]
Aguilar W, Santamaría-Bonfil G, Froese T and Gershenson C
(2014) The
past, present, and future of artificial life. Front. Robot. AI 1:8.
doi: 10.3389/frobt.2014.00008 [recent comprehensive review of
Alife which is a good place to start if you are interested]
D.J. Watts (2002) A simple model
of global cascades on random networks. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA
99 (2002) 5766 [explores a threshold model, like Granovetta's riot
model, but situates agents on random graphs]
Watts and Dodds (2009) Threshold
models of social influence. The Oxford Handbook of Analytical
Sociology. Hedstrom & Bearman (eds), Oxford University Press.
Chapter 20. [nice overview of threshold models of social influcnece
plus results from such models on various networks]
Hammond, R. & Axelrod, R. (2006). The
Evolution of Ethnocentrism. Journal of Conflict Resolution,
December 2006, 50: 926-936. [model of ethnocentrism in the form of an
artificial society]
Kirman, A. & N. Vriend (2000), "Evolving Market Structure: A
Model of Price Dispersion and Loyalty for the Marseille Fish Market",
in Interaction and Market Structure, Edited by Delli Gatti, Gallegati
and Kirman , Springer Verlag, Heidelberg [ABM looking at
self-organsed loyalty based on observations of a real fish
market] http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/nvriend/pub/spring1.pdf
Parsons, S., Marcinkiewicz, M., Niu, J., and Phelps, S. 2008.
Everything you wanted to know about double auctions, but were afraid to
(bid or) ask. Tech. rep., Department of Computer and Information
Science, Brooklyn College. [overview of double action markets for and
by computer scientists] http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~parsons/projects/mech-design/publications/cda.pdf
Cliff, D. 1997. Minimal-intelligence agents for bargaining
behaviours in market-based environments. Tech. rep. HP-97-91,
Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories, Bristol, England. [Cliff
introduces the ZIP trading <>agent and compares it with the ZI
agent.
Includes complete list of C source code for CDA market and ZIP agent] http://www.agent.ai/doc/upload/200406/clif97_2.pdf
Das, Kephart and Tesauro (2001) Agent-Human Interactions in
the Continuous Double Auction, Proc. of the Int. Joint Conf. on
Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Seattle, USA [experiments with
human traders and ZIP agents. ZIP can do better] http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-kephart/AgentHuman.pdf
W. Brian Arthur (1994) “Inductive Reasoning and Bounded
Rationality”, American Economic Review, 84,406–411 [Arthur introduces
El Farol Bar problem - which later become simplied to Minority Game] http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~wbarthur/Papers/El_Farol.pdf
F. A. Hayek (1945). "The Use of Knowledge in Society," American
Economic Review, 35(4), pp. 519-530 [a famous article by a famous
economist about how money and markets are a form of self-organising
distributed information system] http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html
Satoshi Nakamoto (2009) Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash
System. [paper that introduced bitcoin] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Ittay Eyal (2015) Bitcoin – The Miner’s Dilemma. SWIFT
institute working
paper no. 2014-006. [emerging problems with centralisation of
mining pools given a game theory / prinsoner's dilemma treatment]
Tobias
Galla, Giancarlo Mosetti, Yi-Cheng Zhang. (2006) Anomalous
fluctuations in Minority Games and related multi-agent models of
financial markets. arXiv:physics/0608091v1 [survey paper] http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0608091v1
Hales, D., Patarin, S. (2005) How to cheat Bittorrent and why
nobody does. Technical Report UBLCS-2005-12, University of Bologna,
Dept. of Comp. Sci. [attempts to link group selection models of
cooperation with a hypothesis concerning why tit-for-tat might be what
is supporting cooperation in Bittorrent] http://www.informatica.unibo.it/it/ricerca/technical-report/2005/pdfs/2005-12.pdf
Rahman, R., Meulpolder, M., Hales, D., Pouwelse, J. and Sips, H.
(2010) Improving Efficiency and Fairness in P2P Systems with
Effort-Based Incentives. Proceedings of the IEEE International
Conference on Communications, 23-27th May 2010, Cape Town, South
Africa. [shows how a different view of incentives based on effort can
improve overall performance in some situations] http://davidhales.com/papers/RewriteIncentives.pdf
Rahman, R., Vinko, T., Hales, D., Pouwelse, J. and Sips, H.
(2011). Design Space Analysis for Modeling Incentives in Distributed
Systems. ACM SIGCOMM 2011. [a general approach for modelling and
discovering novel incentive systems specifically applied to bittorrent
protocal variants] http://davidhales.com/papers/sigcomm2011.pdf
Bittorrent filesharing client (allows you to download files from
.torrent files and see the different peers you connect to and how much
upload/download you give and get): http://www.bittorrent.com/
NetLogo Bittorrent simulator by Rotem Ganel. Page contains link
to
NetLogo code and associated analysis paper of the results. I have not
played with this or looked at the code or anaysis in detail. However it
looks very interesting: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~rg5/recentwork
If you want to run and compete in core wars tournaments start
here - I've never used this: http://www.corewars.org/
Software exists to run Tom Ray's Tierra system - again I've not
explored this: http://life.ou.edu/tierra/
You can download the bitcoin client from here (note
cryptocurrencies can go down as well as up!): http://bitcoin.org
Prof. Sandel's famous lecture on Rawls' theory of justice
expanded out to encompase a rational basis for a just social contract
(do you buy it?): http://youtu.be/VcL66zx_6No
Prof Amartya Sen (Nobel Laureate) provides a short interesting
point of view that can be contrasted with Rawls' approach relating
other intellectual traditions: http://youtu.be/IRErRJY4zTM
John Holland in a 2008 lecture giving an overview of complex
adaptive systems (CAS) and also at the end the problems of doing
interdisciplinary academic work: http://youtu.be/6aN6PlsvkpY
Interview with Thomas Schelling - he briefly talks about his
segregation model at about 58mins: https://youtu.be/fujQaAgqgxQ
Podcasts
If you are interested in economics then you could do worse than
subscribe to the EconTalk podcast. This podcast presents weekly
interviews with some of the world's leading economists (generally)
speaking in plain language about their ideas: http://www.econtalk.org/
Nick Szabo’s page contains a lot of interesting work. He has been
working with crypto. money, the idea of smart contracts and how law and
code can relate (amoung others): http://szabo.best.vwh.net
