Title: A gentle introduction to the minimal Naming Game,
Abstract: Social conventions govern countless behaviors all of us engage in every day,
from how we greet each other to the languages we speak. But how can shared
conventions emerge spontaneously in the absence of a central coordinating
authority? The Naming Game model shows that networks of locally interacting
individuals can spontaneously self-organize to produce global coordination.
Here, we provide a gentle introduction to the main features of the model, from
the dynamics observed in homogeneously mixing populations to the role played by
more complex social networks, and to how slight modifications of the basic
interaction rules give origin to a richer phenomenology in which more
conventions can co-exist indefinitely.