This is article is part 1 of a series of articles that aim to highlight the aesthetics that can be found in the computational world and data universes. It is as Walframe puts it an “abstract voyages in the computational world”[1]. Hence, I decided to start with a Cellular Automata model as it can tell us a lot about the nature of modeling and its inseparable relation to aesthetics. If you do not know what Cellular Automata means, do not worry, I will explain it in the first section of this article. All the code relevant to this article can be found on Github.

The models presented in this article (Nowak model) is a two-dimensional, time-continuous, “deterministic” version of the simple Prisoner’s Dilemma presented earlier. The model considered a system where Moore-neighborhood (figure 7a) interactions and an accumulative history for each grid. Hence, each grid presents one player (Player A in green) interacting with another grid (Player B in red). Thus, at each time step, player A makes 8 decisions while interacting with all the neighboring grids. The same player copies the best strategy within the Moore-neighborhood. These strategies can be one of two types, either complying (C ) or defecting (D). These definitions make this model more dynamic than tit-for-tat models. Furthermore, periodic boundary conditions (figure 7b) are imposed. Hence, players at boundaries do not experience a discontinuity in the number of their neighbors which leads to a more coherent model.

What you see here is a simulation of 1000 players. When a player deceives another player they are marked as red. On the other hand when a player decides to stay ethical they are colored blue. This is part of an interesting research on evolution of human behavior. You can learn about the parameters that make community more evil or more altruistic by read my article: “Aesthetics Within the Computation World- Part 1: Evolutionary Games”