Humans are fundamentally social creatures, we live in families, work in teams and our norms of formed from thousands of years of social interaction. What if, along that timeline, something different happened? Well, that’s where Agent-Based Modelling and, more specifically, Agent-Based Social Simulation comes into play. By asking counterfactual “what-if” questions, we can simulate, using socially interacting agents, “what would’ve happened” and “what will happen”. The overall goal of such endeavours being to understand the underlying conditions that give rise to these complex social phenomena and how policies affect them.

In this presentation, we will cover what Agent-Based Social Simulation is, how it is different to standard optimisation tasks and the role Machine Learning and AI plays in these systems. We will also go over the history of Agent-Based Social Simulation and illustrate some of new and exciting fields that are using it such as Epidemiology, Disaster Management and Computational Archaeology. Lastly, we will take a look at some recent developments in the field and try to predict what will happen next.