The Significance of Perfect Information within Social Simulations based on Cellular Automata
Summary
This research covers the question if the assumption of perfect information within a cellular automaton based social simulation has a significant impact on the behaviour within the simulation. Perfect information means that all agents within the social simulation have access to all information in their neighbourhood. To test if perfect information has a significant impact, I first recreated the social network simulation of Hegselmann and Flache (1998). Their simulation assumes perfect information when agents move through the cellular automaton. Secondly, I removed perfect information from the simulation by implementing a basic function of uncertainty such that agents have less information about faraway cells. Afterwards I compared the two simulations to find that when the certainty drops fast enough there were significant differences in two cases.