Social Agents

Social agents are cognitive entities that reason about and interact with one another. Formal and computational models of social agents will have properties familiar to AI researchers, such as beliefs, desires, intentions, utility maximization, inferential mechanisms, etc., but in addition to these they will also have attributes, emotions, attitudes, dispositions, etc. that have hitherto been the domain of social scientists and psychologists. Moreover, complete rationality and deep reasoning have been shown to be unrealistic assumptions in human interactions and decision making in many contexts, so useful models of social agent communities should take these limitations into account. The roles played by bounded rationality and emotive attitudes cannot be sidelined. This position paper reviews work in this area and proposes a methodology for computational models, specifically using logic programs, of social agents that is amenable to both simulation and game-theoretic investigation. In particular we address the problem of social agent populations that are large, numbered in the thousands.The original publication is available at JAIST Press http://www.jaist.ac.jp/library/jaist-press/index.htmlIFSR 2005 : Proceedings of the First World Congress of the International Federation for Systems Research : The New Roles of Systems Sciences For a Knowledge-based Society : Nov. 14-17, 2155, Kobe, JapanSymposium 2, Session 7 : Creation of Agent-Based Social Systems Sciences Systems Science and Application