Using diffusion characters for the taxonomy of self-organizing social networks

Abstract

This study evolves agents to play iterated prisoners dilemma with choice and refusal. The choice and refusal mechanism causes the agents to self-organize social networks. We then apply a novel technique for inducing a pseudometric on the space of networks using diffusion characters to analyze the resulting social networks, and create an exploratory taxonomy of the social networks. The taxonomy agrees well with features visible in rendered drawing of the networks as well as with similarities in the fitness trajectories of the populations that give rise to those networks.