ABSTRACT
Agent-based computational economics (ACE) has been long considered a computational companion to evolutionary economics (EE) or simply computational EE; its main connection to EE is its extensive incorporation of the idea of evolution, adaptation, learning, autonomy, emergence, open end, and adapted complexity. The manifestation of these ideas is frequently facilitated by the use of methods or tools from, inter alia, artificial intelligence, mathematical psychology, and cognitive science. In this chapter, we shall argue that ACE can, in effect, be further tightly connected to EE in its adoption of the minimal principle as a general guidance of its model construction. While the minimal principle is often interpreted synonymously with the simplicity principle or the maximum entropy principle, this chapter distinguishes the pursuits of these principles and argues that only the minimal principle has a root in Darwinian evolution. We expound on this point by using the current practice of minimal intelligence in ACE as a concrete illustration. The nutshell of this chapter is, therefore, that as a computational EE, the minimum principle should precede others.
