Simon T. Powers

• PhD
• Lecturer at University of Stirling

What drove the transition from small-scale human societies centred on kinship and personal exchange, to large-scale societies comprising cooperation and division of labour among untold numbers of unrelated individuals? We propose that the unique human capacity to negotiate institutional rules that coordinate social actions was a key driver of this...

Understanding the evolution of sociality in humans and other species requires understanding how selection on social behaviour varies with group size. However, the effects of group size are frequently obscured in the theoretical literature, which often makes assumptions that are at odds with empirical findings. In particular, mechanisms are suggeste...

Artificial life is concerned with understanding the dynamics of human societies. A defining feature of any society is its institutions. However, defining exactly what an institution is has proven difficult, with authors often talking past each other. This article presents a dynamic model of institutions, which views them as political game forms tha...

Reducing the peak energy consumption of households is essential for the effective use of renewable energy sources, in order to ensure that as much household demand as possible can be met by renewable sources. This entails spreading out the use of high-powered appliances such as dishwashers and washing machines throughout the day. Traditional approa...

A manifest trend is that larger and more productive human groups shift from distributed to centralized decision-making. Voluntary theories propose that human groups shift to hierarchy to limit scalar stress, i.e. the increase in cost of organization as a group grows. Yet, this hypothesis lacks a mechanistic model to investigate the organizational a...

There is general agreement that fostering trust and cooperation within the AI development ecosystem is essential to promote the adoption of trustworthy AI systems. By embedding Large Language Model (LLM) agents within an evolutionary game-theoretic framework, this paper investigates the complex interplay between AI developers, regulators and users,...

This paper investigates the complex interplay between AI developers, regulators, users, and the media in fostering trustworthy AI systems. Using evolutionary game theory and large language models (LLMs), we model the strategic interactions among these actors under different regulatory regimes. The research explores two key mechanisms for achieving...

There is general agreement that some form of regulation is necessary both for AI creators to be incentivised to develop trustworthy systems, and for users to actually trust those systems. But there is much debate about what form these regulations should take and how they should be implemented. Most work in this area has been qualitative, and has no...

The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be." The study and pursuit of open-ended evolution in artificial evolutionary systems exemplify this goal. However, open-ended evolution research is hampered by...

Recent activity in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has given rise to large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and Bard. These are undoubtedly impressive achievements, but they raise serious questions about appropriation, accuracy, explainability, accessibility, responsibility, and more. There have been pusillanimous and self-exculpating...

All societies need to form institutional rules to regulate their social interactions. These specify what actions individuals should take in particular situations, and what sanctions will apply if individuals violate these rules. However, forming these institutional rules involves playing a political game—a process of negotiation between individuals...

With the number of individual vehicles meeting the capacity limit of urban road infrastructure, the deployment of new mobility services may help to achieve more efficient use of available resources and prevent critical overload. It may be observed that most of the seats in private vehicles remain unused during the journey. Therefore, increasing the...

As we move towards an energy system based on renewable energy sources, we need to consider their inflexibility to meet sudden peaks in demand. It is therefore important to reduce the peak load placed on our energy system. For individual households this means spreading out the use of high-powered appliances, such as dishwashers and washing machines,...

Cause-effect graphs have been applied in non agent-based simulations, where they are used to model chained causal relations between input parameters and system behaviour measured by appropriate indicators. This can be useful for the analysis and interpretation of simulations. However, multi-agent simulations shift the paradigm of chained causal rel...

Urban traffic is a system always prone to overload, often approaching breakdown during rush hour times. Well-adjusted modifications of traffic policies, with appropriate interventions, promise potential improvements by inducing change in both individual as well as global system behaviour. However, truly effective measures are hard to identify, and...

The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be" (1989, p.1). The study and pursuit of open-ended evolution in artificial evolutionary systems exemplifies this goal. However, open-ended evolution research i...

Leadership is a widespread phenomena in social organisms and it is recognised to facilitate coordination between individuals. If the role of leadership in group foraging or swarm movement is well understood, it is not clear if leaders would also benefit more complex forms of coordination. In particular, a number of organisms coordinate by consensus...

This paper surveys five human societal types – mobile foragers, horticulturalists, pre-state agriculturalists, state-based agriculturalists, and liberal democracies – from the perspective of three core social problems faced by interacting individuals: coordination problems, social dilemmas, and contest problems. We characterize the occurrence of th...

This paper surveys five human societal types -- mobile foragers, horticulturalists, pre-state agriculturalists, state-based agriculturalists, and liberal democracies -- from the perspective of three core social problems faced by interacting individuals: coordination problems, social dilemmas, and contest problems. We characterize the occurrence of...

Human groups show a variety of leadership dynamics ranging from egalitarian groups with no leader, to groups with changing leaders, to absolutist groups with a single long-term leader. Here, we model transitions between these different phases of leadership dynamics, investigating the role of inequalities in relationships between individuals. Our re...

Individual traffic significantly contributes to climate change and environmental degradation. Therefore, innovation in sustainable mobility is gaining importance as it helps to reduce environmental pollution. However, effects of new ideas in mobility are difficult to estimate in advance and strongly depend on the individual traffic participants. Th...

AGADE Traffic is an agent-based traffic simulator that can be used to analyse purpose-driven travel behaviour of individuals that leads to the emergence of systemic patterns in mobility. The simulator uses semantic technology to model knowledge of individuals and thus is able to capture individual preferences and personal objectives as determining...

Traffic can be viewed as a complex adaptive system in which systemic patterns arise as emergent phenomena. Global behaviour is a result of behavioural patterns of a large set of individual travellers. However, available traffic simulation models lack of concepts to comprehensibly capture preferences and personal objectives as determining factors of...

Introduction The actions of intelligent agents, such as chatbots, recommender systems, and virtual assistants are typically not fully transparent to the user (Beldad et al., 2016; Chung et al., 2017). Consequently, users take the risk that such agents act in ways opposed to the users' preferences or goals (Luhmann, 1979). It is often argued that pe...

To resolve the major controversy about why prosocial behaviors persist in large-scale human societies, we propose that two questions need to be answered. First, how do social interactions in small-scale and large-scale societies differ? By reviewing the exchange and collective-action dilemmas in both small-scale and large-scale societies, we show t...

In state of the art research a growing interest in the application of agent models for the simulation of road traffic can be observed. Software agents are particularly suitable for the representation of travellers and their goal-oriented behaviour. Although numerous applications based on these types of models are already available, the options for...

To resolve the major controversy about why prosocial behaviors persist in large‐scale human societies, we propose that two questions need to be answered. First, how do social interactions in small‐scale and large‐scale societies differ? By reviewing the exchange and collective‐action dilemmas in both small‐scale and large‐scale societies, we show t...

The actions of intelligent agents, such as chatbots, recommender systems, and virtual assistants are typically not fully transparent to the user. Consequently, users take the risk that such agents act in ways opposed to the users’ preferences or goals. It is often argued that people use trust as a cognitive shortcut to reduce the complexity of such...

In most countries population in urban areas is growing, while available travel infrastructure and resources are limited. At the same time desires to minimise environmental impact and energy use have led to new requirements in the field of inner-city transportation. As a result, the portfolio of mobility services provided is developing in order to i...

The actions of intelligent agents, such as chatbots, recommender systems, and virtual assistants are typically not fully transparent to the user. Consequently, using such an agent involves the user exposing themselves to the risk that the agent may act in a way opposed to the user's goals. It is often argued that people use trust as a cognitive sho...

Reducing the peak energy consumption of households is essential for the effective use of renewable energy sources, in order to ensure that as much household demand as possible can be met by renewable sources. This entails spreading out the use of high-powered appliances such as dishwashers and washing machines throughout the day. Traditional approa...

Human groups show a variety of leadership structures from no leader, to changing leaders, to a single long-term leader. When a leader is deposed, the presence of a power vacuum can mean they are often quickly replaced. We lack an explanation of how such phenomena can emerge from simple rules of interraction between individuals. Here, we model trans...

Intelligent AI systems using approaches containing emergent elements often encounter acceptance problems. Results do not get sufficiently explained and the procedure itself can not be fully retraced because the flow of control is dependent on stochastic elements. Trust in such algorithms must be established so that users will accept results, withou...

Human social hierarchy has the unique characteristic of existing in two forms. Firstly, as an informal hierarchy where leaders and followers are implicitly defined by their personal characteristics, and secondly, as an institutional hierarchy where leaders and followers are explicitly appointed by group decision. Although both forms can reduce the...

Reducing peak electricity consumption is important to maximise use of renewable energy sources, and reduce the total amount of capacity required on a grid. Most approaches use a centralised optimisation algorithm run by a utility company. Here we develop a decentralised approach, where agents represent the interests of a household, and negotiate ov...

We present an agent based framework for improving multi-stakeholder optimisation problems, which we define as optimisation problems where the solution is utilised by a number of stakeholders who have their own local preferences. We explore our ideas within the domain of the University Timetabling Problem, demonstrating how a solution created by tra...

To resolve the major controversy about how large-scale societies could ever evolve and be maintained, we propose that two questions need to be answered. First, how do social interactions in small-scale and large-scale societies differ? By reviewing the exchange and collective-action dilemmas in both small-scale and large-scale societies, we show th...

The activity of commuting to and from a place of work affects not only those travelling but also wider society through their contribution to congestion and pollution. It is desirable to have a means of simulating commuting in order to allow organisations to predict the effects of changes to working patterns and locations and inform decision making....

Human social hierarchy has the unique characteristic of existing in two forms. Firstly, as an informal hierarchy where leaders and followers are implicitly defined by their personal characteristics, and secondly, as an institutional hierarchy where leaders and followers are explicitly appointed by group decision. Although both forms can reduce the...

Intelligent machines have reached capabilities that go beyond a level that a human being can fully comprehend without sufficiently detailed understanding of the underlying mechanisms. The choice of moves in the game Go (generated by Deep Mind?s Alpha Go Zero [1]) are an impressive example of an artificial intelligence system calculating results tha...

Hierarchy is an efficient way for a group to organize, but often goes along with inequality that benefits leaders. To control despotic behaviour, followers can assess leaders decisions by aggregating their own and their neighbours experience, and in response challenge despotic leaders. But in hierarchical social networks, this interactional justice...

Empirical work has shown that societies can sometimes avoid antisocial outcomes, such as the Tragedy of the Commons, by establishing institutional rules that govern their interactions. Moreover, groups are more likely to avoid antisocial outcomes when they design and enforce their own rules. But this raises the question: when will group members put...

Hierarchy is an efficient way for a group to organize, but often goes along with inequality that benefits leaders. To control despotic behaviour, followers can assess leaders’ decisions by aggregating their own and their neighbours’ experience, and in response challenge despotic leaders. But in hierarchical social networks, this interactional justi...

The sudden transition from egalitarian groups to hierarchical societies that occurred with the origin of agriculture is one of the most striking features of the evolution of human societies. Hierarchy is reflected by the evolution of an asymmetrical distribution of the influence of individuals. Although the benefits to leaders themselves are easily...

The mechanisms of variation, selection and inheritance, on which evolution by natural selection depends, are not fixed over evolutionary time. Current evolutionary biology is increasingly focussed on understanding how the evolution of developmental organisations modifies the distribution of phenotypic variation, the evolution of ecological relation...

Artificial Life is concerned with understanding the dynamics of human societies. A defining feature of any human society is its institutions. However, defining exactly what an institution is has proven difficult, with authors often talking past each other. This paper presents a dynamic model of institutions, which views institutions as political ga...

Social evolution theory conventionally takes an externalist explanatory stance, treating observed cooperation as explanandum and the positive assortment of cooperative behaviour as explanans. We ask how the circumstances bringing about this positive assortment arose in the first place. Rather than merely push the explanatory problem back a step, we...

Background The structure and organisation of ecological interactions within an ecosystem is modified by the evolution and coevolution of the individual species it contains. Understanding how historical conditions have shaped this architecture is vital for understanding system responses to change at scales from the microbial upwards. However, in the...

The Neolithic was marked by a transition from small and relatively egalitarian groups to much larger groups with increased stratification. But, the dynamics of this remain poorly understood. It is hard to see how despotism can arise without coercion, yet coercion could not easily have occurred in an egalitarian setting. Using a quantitative model o...

Altruistic punishment (AP)—punishment of those contributing little to the public good—has been proposed as an explanation for the extraordinary extent of human culture relative to other species. AP is seen as supporting the high levels of altruism necessary for the cooperation underlying this culture, including information exchange. However, humans...

Human cooperation is typically coordinated by institutions, which determine the outcome structure of the social interactions individuals engage in. Explaining the Neolithic transition from small- to large-scale societies involves understanding how these institutions co-evolve with demography. We study this using a demographically explicit model of...

Selection on the level of loosely associated groups has been suggested as a route towards the evolution of cooperation between individuals and the subsequent formation of higher-level biological entities. Such group selection explanations remain problematic, however, due to the narrow range of parameters under which they can overturn within-group s...

Multilevel selection and the evolution of cooperation are fundamental to the formation of higher-level organisation and the evolution of biocomplexity, but such notions are controversial and poorly understood in natural populations. The theoretic principles of group selection are well developed in idealised models where a population is neatly divid...

The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits that affect their population structure to some degree. These traits, such as a group size preference, affect...

Pro-social punishment, whereby cooperators punish defectors, is often suggested as a mechanism that maintains cooperation in large human groups. Importantly, models that support this idea have to date only allowed defectors to be the target of punishment. However, recent empirical work has demonstrated the existence of anti-social punishment in pub...

Multilevel selection and the evolution of cooperation are fundamental to the formation of higher-level organisation and the evolution of biocomplexity, but such notions are controversial and poorly understood in natural populations. The theoretic principles of group selection are well developed in idealised models where a population is neatly divid...

The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits that affect their population structure to some degree. These traits, such as a group size preference, affect...

The question of how cooperative groups can evolve and be maintained is fundamental to understanding the evolution of social behaviour in general, and the major transitions in particular. Here, we show how selection on an individual trait for group size preference can increase variance in fitness at the group-level, thereby leading to an increase in...

Group selection is easily observed when spatial group structure is imposed on a population. In fact, spatial structure is just a means of providing assortative interactions such that the benefits of cooperating are delivered to other cooperators more than to selfish individuals. In principle, assortative interactions could be supported by individua...

Cooperative behaviours can be defined as those that benefit others at an apparent cost to self. How these kinds of behaviours evolve has been a topic of great interest in evolutionary biology, as the Darwinian paradigm seems to suggest that nature will be “red in tooth and claw” and that we would not expect one organism to evolve to help another. T...

Cooperative behaviours can be defined as those that benefit others at an apparent cost to self. How these kinds of behaviours can evolve has been a topic of great interest in evolutionary biology, for at first sight we would not expect one organism to evolve to help another. Explanations for cooperation rely on the presence of a population structur...

Document is itself an extended abstract.

The role of symbiosis in macro-evolution is poorly understood. On the one hand, symbiosis seems to be a perfectly normal manifestation of individual selection, on the other hand, in some of the major transitions in evolution it seems to be implicated in the creation of new higher-level units of selection. Here we present a model of individual selec...

How do new evolutionary units, supporting higher levels of functional organisation, arise from existing evolutionary units? The adaptive transformation of co-adapted species into new units, as in the major evolutionary transitions, is centrally implicated in the evolution of complexity but has proved very problematic for current evolutionary theory...

Models of the evolution of social behaviour are often framed in terms of either multi-level selection or inclusive individual fitness theory. Although both of these descriptions correctly predict changes in gene frequency (where group fitness is defined as the average individual fitness of the group members), it is still a hotly contested issue as...

Selection on the level of loosely associated groups has been suggested as a route towards the evolution of cooperation between individuals and the subsequent formation of higher-level biological entities. Such group selection explanations remain problematic, however, due to the narrow range of parameters under which they can overturn within-group s...

Network intrusion detection is the problem of detecting unauthorised use of, or access to, computer systems over a network. Two broad approaches exist to tackle this problem: anomaly detection and misuse detection. An anomaly detection system is trained only on examples of normal connections, and thus has the potential to detect novel attacks. Howe...

A key problem in understanding major transitions in evolution is the evolution of cooperation: how are mutants that exploit the benefits of cooperation without paying the costs (cheats) suppressed within populations? Biofilms, which display properties of both single cell and multicellular organisms, provide an excellent model system to address this...

Models of the evolution of social behaviour are often framed in terms of either multi-level selection or inclusive individual fitness theory. Although both of these descriptions correctly predict changes in gene frequency (where group fitness is defined as the average individual fitness of the group members), it is still a hotly contested issue as...

How do new evolutionary units, supporting higher levels of functional organisation, arise from existing evolutionary units? The adaptive transformation of co-adapted species into new units, as in the major evolutionary transitions, is centrally implicated in the evolution of complexity but has proved very problematic for current evolutionary theory...

A key problem in understanding major transitions in evolution is the evolution of cooperation: how are mutants that exploit the benefits of cooperation without paying the costs (cheats) suppressed within populations? Biofilms, which display properties of both single cell and multicellular organisms, provide an excellent model system to address this...

It is well known that the evolution of cooperative behaviour is dependant upon certain environmental conditions. One such condition that has been extensively studied is the use of a spatially structured population, whereby cooperation is favoured by a reduced number of interactions between cooperators and selfish cheaters. However, models that addr...

It is well known that certain environmental conditions, such as a spatially structured population, can promote the evolution of cooperative traits. However, such conditions are usually assumed to be externally imposed. In this paper, we present a model that allows the conditions that promote or hinder cooperation to arise adaptively via individual...

In this paper we outline a simple model of spatially structured populations that is an extension of the replicator dynamics approach used in evolutionary game theory. Using this model, we are able to investigate issues such as how the degree of spatial localisation affects the evolution of cooperative and selfish genotypes in a resource sharing sce...

In this paper we outline a simple model of spatially structured populations that is an extension of the replicator dynamics approach used in evolutionary game theory. Using this model, we are able to investigate issues such as how the degree of spatial localisation affects the evolution of cooperative and selfish genotypes in a resource sharing sce...

Network intrusion detection is the problem of detecting unauthorised use of, or access to, computer systems over a network. One approach is anomaly detection, where deviations from a model of normal network activity are reported. The negative selection algorithm, inspired by the immune system, can be used to generate anomaly detectors. Previous wor...

Network intrusion detection is the problem of detecting unauthorised use of, or access to, computer systems over a network. One approach is anomaly detection, where deviations from a model of normal network activity are reported. The negative selection algorithm, inspired by the immune system, can be used to generate anomaly detectors. Previous wor...

During a major transition, former free-living entities relinquish their own individuality and aggregate into groups, such that the group becomes an evolutionary individual in its own right (Maynard Smith and Szathmary, 1995; Michod, 1999). Essential to this process is cooperation, for the group members must cooperate to contribute to the success of...