Agent-Based Modeling: an Evolutionary Perspective
Francis Steen


     Anticipating others' behavior presents a central adaptive challenge for all animals; in certain cases, modeling other agents is the optimal solution. In this talk, I will discuss some of the conditions under which
agent-based modeling would be useful to mammals and argue that hominid cognitive evolution may have been spurred in part by the need to model other agents. I will also present a hypothesis about the cognitive
architecture that implements agent-based modeling in humans and argue that the functional output of this architecture is for principled reasons very difficult to mimic effectively with a computer program.