Agent-based modelling (ABM) involves simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents to assess their effects on an entire system. ABMs typically represent agents as having decision-making heuristics and learning rules, interacting within an environment according to an interaction topology. John Conway's "Game of Life" and Thomas Schelling's segregation models were early influential ABMs. Robert Axelrod's tournament of the Prisoner's Dilemma game demonstrated that simple reciprocal strategies like "Tit for Tat" can emerge and persist through evolution. ABM became widespread in the 1990s for modeling phenomena such as disease spread, riots, and urban growth.
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