Vietnam Dynasty and Sandpile Modeling

The questions about the emergence, functioning, and decline of empires in human history continue to attract scholarly attention. Conventional research has identified economics, population, climate change, and international relations as important factors that determine the constant rising and falling of empires. Based on them, we proposed a more scientific and advanced method, agent-based modeling, to investigate the life cycle dynamics. The sandpile model is applied to build multi-agent systems. According to the sandpile model, the dissipative structure and chaos theory coincides with the life cycle dynamics, which is evolving periodically. Agent-based sandpile model is applied here to investigate, simulate, and back-calculate Vietnam empires. According to this, we can find the optimal solutions, under which repeated simulations (N = 1000) can perfectly match empires in history. Macroscopically, the number of simulated empires is normally distributed. The average number of simulated empires is 9.634 (≈10), which strictly matches 10 empires in real history. Combining agent-based modeling and simulations, this work unveils the homogeneity or similarity between natural systems (sandpile) and human societies (empires).