The Future and Emerging Technologies-Open project IBSEN is designed to provide a breakthrough in our understanding of large scale human behaviour. IBSEN is a high-risk project with a high-degree of interdisciplinarity; the team consists of physicists, economists, social psychologists, and computer scientists.
The project's aspiration is to develop a large scale human behavior simulator, a technology providing a basis for socio-economic simulations that would radically change many fields with technological and societal impacts. The project wants to kick start a new way of doing social science for the problems arising in a technologically highly connected society.
In this Nature results paper the project makes inroads to its final goal by generaling a model of groups behaviour (agressive and cooperative) to any number N of individuals, making it applicable to large groups.
They derive and numerically solve an exact equation for the evolution of the system in both finite and infinite well-mixed populations, finding the conditions for all different types of dynamics including stable coexistence between both types of group behavior or dominance of one of the groups, depending on a number of controllable parameters.