From: Keo Ormsby (chor02@xenomexico.org)
Date: Mon 13 Dec 2004 - 23:51:49 GMT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Patrick" <a.patrick@btinternet.com>
To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>; <bafuture@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2004 6:58 AM
Subject: This is interesting
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65317,00.html
This is indeed very interesting. Let me yet again tiresomely
ponder on and on, and risk an unreplied post.
>From a traditional Western view of rules and laws, what the
Southampton team did was "legal cheating", i.e. finding a
loophole in the rules. This would be unremarkable (we see it
happen in courts everyday) if it were not for the fact that here
the rules were unbelievably simple, and seemingly would answer
the "intended" question posed by the competition's organizers
(namely, is tit-for-tat the best strategy for the iterated
prisoner's dilemma?) If we stay with the traditional view of
rules, the answer to this problem is to be very clever rule
makers and make more rules that fix this (amendments). But I will
bet you good money that someone will come up with another
strategy that "bypasses" the original intention without actually
breaking the rules. So we will end up with an arms race between
rules and competitors, and hence in no time we will have a 1000
page rulebook for the iterative prisoner's dilemma. But what
boggles my mind in this case is the inability to propose an
airtight rule system even in a situation as simple as this one.
What hope do we have for a reasonably good law system, if even
scientists cannot come up with a simple solution to a simple rule
problem? Lawmakers are notoriously biased and in many cases dim
witted, so, are these the people that will write airtight
corporate laws on complex financial systems? That the arms race
has started a long time ago is obvious, just walk in any legal
library. Most western people are proud of the intricacies and
complexities of their legal system, and consider it civilized to
have a rule for every single human act, human possession, or even
animal or mineral matters. That we have gone from "thou shalt not
steal" to thousands of pages of laws on fraud, money laundering,
insider trading, etc. in my mind is not progress, its just
testament of a poor strategy (an arms race) to achieve justice.
So, before I get chastised by our moderator (just joking), let us
go to the memes. In the competition case, from a memetic view it
makes a lot a sense that this is happening. You define your
system as comprised of entities (programs, strategies) that have
to have a certain effect on the environment (made of other
programs and judges), and must succeed (win in most matches). I
will grant that this is not a strict memetic situation, since the
favored strategy is not rewarded by replication, but by $50, but
I believe an evolutionary approach is still warranted (just
substitute the 50 clams for "leaves offspring"). The point is
that as in all evolutionary systems, the end justifies the means,
so obeying the spirit or intentions of the rules may be more,
less or equally rewarded as loopholing (or even outright
cheating). The important part here is the reward part. The
organizers wanted to answer the question posed above, so they set
a rule to themselves where they would give the prize to ANY
strategy that WON the most number of matches without braking the
RULES. Sound sensible, but we saw what happened. So if instead of
making amendments to the RULES, you can change the definition of
WINNING. If the reward is given to the strategy that best answers
the question (the most illustrative), not the one that wins most
matches, we are back on track. Of course this begs the question
on how to evaluate the "illustrativeness", without human bias,
but that is something I think scientists can work out easier,
instead of devising more and more rules. A rule is a suboptimal
straightforward partial solution to a game theory problem. If we
see how evolutionary scientists try (albeit not as successfully
as we would like) to solve problems in biology (epidemics,
breeding, stopping extinction) without the ability to set rules
(imagine something as ridiculous as: "by order of health
authorities, it is forbidden for influenza viruses to mutate more
than one base pair per 100 replications") we may gain insights on
how to play the memetic game (life) fairly for all contestants.
Keo Ormsby
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