Dresden 2003 – scientific programme

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AKSOE: Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

AKSOE 9: Soziale Systeme und Entscheidungsmodelle

AKSOE 9.1: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 27, 2003, 09:30–10:15, BAR/205

Transitions to global culture from a statistical physics viewpoint — •M. San Miguel, K. Klemm, V. M. Eguiluz, and R. Toral — IMEDEA, Campus Universitat Illes Balears, E-07071 Palma de Mallorca, Spain

We study Axelrod’s model for the dissemination of culture. The T=0 nonequilibrium phase transition between a culturally polarized and a culturally fragmented phase is shown to disappear when cultural drift (noise) is at work. We find that a noise induced transition to a culturally fragmented phase is fixed by the rate of the stochastic perturbations. The average size of the largest culturally homogeneous domain is a universal function of the product of system size and noise rate. These results can be understood in terms of an optimization dynamics in the d=1 version of the model.

We also analyze the T=0 transition in different social complex networks. In a small world network the transition is postponed by increasing the degree of disorder of the underlying network. In scale-free networks the transition only exists for finite size networks, but it persists in the thermodynamic limit of structured scale free networks which incorporate some degree of clustering.

References: Papers and presentations on this work can be found at http://www.imedea.uib.es/physdept/research_topics/socio/culture.html