Bit-strings and other modifications of Viviane model for language competition

✍ Scribed by P.M.C. de Oliveira; D. Stauffer; F.W.S. Lima; A.O. Sousa; C. Schulze; S. Moss de Oliveira

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 505 KB
• Volume: 376
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0378-4371
• DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2006.10.022

✦ Synopsis

The language competition model of Viviane de Oliveira et al. is modified by associating with each language a string of 32 bits. Whenever a language changes in this Viviane model, also one randomly selected bit is flipped. If then only languages with different bit-strings are counted as different, the resulting size distribution of languages agrees with the empirically observed slightly asymmetric log-normal distribution. Several other modifications were also tried but either had more free parameters or agreed less well with reality.