The aim is to construct parallel simulations consisting of computational devices, referred to as agents, with given properties, in order to model the target phenomena.
The concept was then extended by von Neumann's friend Stanislaw Ulam, also a mathematician, who suggested that the machine be built on paper, as a collection of cells on a grid.
Unlike von Neumann's machine, Conway's Game of Life operated according to tremendously simple rules in a virtual world in the form of a 2-dimensional checkerboard.
He attempted to model living biological agents, a method known as artificial life, a term coined by Christopher Langton.
For many, artificial society is a meeting point for people from many other more traditional fields in interdisciplinary research, such as linguistics, social physics, mathematics, philosophy, law, computer science, biology, and sociology in which unusual computational and theoretical approaches that would be controversial within their native discipline can be discussed.