An Easy Walk through Computational Social Science: Simulation without Theory or a New Kind of Social Science?
2012/08/28
研討會日期 : 2012-08-28
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Shu-Heng Chen
地點 : Conference Room C103
演講者簡介 : Shu-Heng Chen received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, Los Angeles in 1992. He is currently serving as Professor of Economics at National Chengchi University. His research field is in econometrics and artificial intelligence economics.
演講摘要 : Computational social science (CSS) is referred to as the computational study of social phenomena as emergent properties of complex adaptive systems. Like in many other interdisciplinary fields, a good understanding of CSS requires knowledge beyond just one single discipline. Without meeting this requirement, CSS is frequently misperceived as a kind of study relying exclusively on computer simulation without theoretic foundations or, simply, ``simulation without theory’’. In this talk, a return to the truly interdisciplinary nature of CSS is attempted. A journey from the early works of Alan Turing, John von Neumann, John Conway, Thomas Schelling, James Sakoda, Peter Albin, all the way down to Stephen Wolfram is taken. This interdisciplinary review enables us to read the simulation models used in social sciences in light of the hierarchy of complex phenomena well established in automata theory, formal language theory and complex dynamic systems, widely referred to as Chomsky hierarchy or its equivalents. Then, as we argue, only by acknowledging the social phenomena which are computationally irreducible or Kolmogorov random, one can begin to realize the significance of the adventure to this ``new kind of social science’’. The computational thinking or computational paradigm has been now applied in several sub-disciplines in economics, including, but not limited to, evolutionary economic, behavioral economics, financial economics and, in particular, macroeconomics after the recent financial crisis. On the other hand, the computational paradigm has also come to school, from K to 12, and has motivated new designs of scientific education in vein of ``low threshold, high ceiling'' as what Uri Wilensky has advocated as a way to achieve the goal of universal literacy.
