Monitoring the Vital Signs in a Complex Social System: An Example Using Cultural Algorithms

It has been conjectured that "Culture is an optimizing process". That is, the social structures that emerge in a given organization support the efficient solution of problems that the organization must deal with. Here we will present an escalating sequence of static problems to our system. Our goal will be to study how the social network infrastructure affects the overall performance of social system of a given complexity. We develop a Cultural Engine metaphor in terms of measures used to describe the entropy of each of the Cultural Algorithm components. The influence function worked analogous to Maxwell's Demon in order to inject new entropy into the system so as to counteract the effect of the second law of thermodynamics. We then applied the system to the solution of a 150 randomly generated problems of varying complexity produced by a problem generation system based upon complexity theory.