A Study Of The Complexity Of Public Opinion Infection Based On The Cellular Automaton Simulation

Public opinion is the most opinions of the public to the specific affairs, which is the inherent phenomenon and characters of human society. In the aspects of simulating and predicting the development trend of human society, relaxing and adjusting the relationship between various groups in society, and accelerating the social development, public opinion plays a very important role. Thus it is valuable to make researches on the infection of public opinion. Since human society is an exoteric and huge complexity system, the process of the infection of public opinion is numerous and complicated. As far, most of the study results are based on the immediate analysis of observation and investigation in human society, however, the study on the mechanism about the formation and evolution of public opinion are still lack. With the development of science, especially complexity science, many techniques employed in physical science have been applied to sociology, which provide a powerful tool for raveling out the complexity of the social motion. Cellular automaton (CA) is a complete discrete and local grid dynamic system, which is used as simple mathematical model to investigate self-organization in statistical mechanics, and especially suitable for complex systems. It has the predominance such as a transparent physical image, parallel computation and having no numerical error. So CA becomes an efficient tool for exploring the complexity of nonlinear systems gradually. In the research of opinion formation based on CA model, two aspects were especially focused on. One was the simulation of the process of opinion formation, which will show the self-organization characters in the evolution of opinion formation. The other was to find an effective way to control the infection of public opinion. This paper will focus on the second aspect. At first, a CA model based on the two dimensional square lattice for the infection of public opinion has been formulated. Then we perform dynamic simulation of the CA model under the influence of the guidance of mass media, individual character and noise, obtaining the results in accord with the reality. By analyzing the simulation results, the mechanism of the formation of public opinion has been made clear, which is a good reference for the control of public opinion. Finally we propose a model based on the "small world networks"in which the "small world networks"is used to simulate the relationship networks between the members of society and simulate the evolution of public opinion by virtue of the model, expecting to find a more effective and realistic model.