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Simulating Societies
blamanj writes "Most of us were exposed fairly early to Conway's game of Life.
A few simple rules produce a fascinating variety of behavior. Now, it
appears that similar simulations can predict the behavior of populations and human societies."
Wow -- this guy really has some issues; perhaps he doesn't understand the concept of "if you don't like it, opt out.."?? Better yet, stop your bitching and start your own site, mod your own posts, and then complain about its inherent flaws. Some people may have way too much time and education -- this is an example....
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
For those who don't get subtil things (or just happened to miss this one)
When you perdict something people tend to act on the perdiction. Thus God sent a profit to warn Niniva of coming doom, but the people repented and so God no longer needed to send that doom. So does the fact that the people lived (for 100 years before some other country invaded) mean that God doesn't exist, or that repenting will save your life?
If everyone knew the terrorist were going to fly a plane into the world trade center in september nobody would have been there. (other than press, and some engineers to study the situation). If the terrorist knew they were discovered like that odds are they would call the whole thing off, and everyone would then laugh at those who gave a warning about something that never happened.
2000 is a perfect example. There were big comptuer problems related to the roll over from 1999 to 2000, but because there was warning the problems were fixed, so there were no problems, so the warnings must have been uneeded right?
There are many more examples that can be thought of. The point is clear though: warnings are a double edged sword.
However I'm willing to perdict the next terrorist bombing will be in Iseral/Palistine. You are now warned. (too bad I can't be more specific, this will do you little good if you live in that area)
In the abstract he states:
"In the Demographic Prisoner's Dilemma, neither assumption is made: agents with finite vision move to random sites on a lattice and play a fixed culturally-inherited zero-memory strategy of cooperate (C) or defect (D) against neighbors."
After his citation of Michael Oliphant's paper (1994) Evolving Cooperation in the Non-Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: The Importance of Spatial Organization published in Brooks, R. and Maes, P. (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th Artificial Life Workshop, pp 349-352, The MIT Press. Epstein proceeds to attempt to justify his paper in comparison to Oliphant's genetic-algorithm paper by emphasizing his definition "culturally-inherited" as follows:
"Perhaps it is worth emphasizing that, in adopting this assumption of a fixed agent strategy, we are not claiming that human strategies are literally hard-wired genetically. Rather, for modelling purposes, we are assuming that they are culturally transmitted from parents to children--vertically transmitted--with high fidelity, like certain religious or ethnic affiliations, tastes, and native tongues. 19 Below we consider the effect of degradation (mutation) in this vertical transmission fidelity."
This definition, as well as from his other descriptions of his algorithms differ in no way from Oliphant's 'genetic' tendencies to defect or cooperate, except to make the environment 2 dimensional instead of one dimensional and to make spatial structure evolve out of variation in "sight" rather than a simple gaussian distribution of mating -- neither of which can be used to distinguish "culturally-inherited" from "genetically-inherited" traits.
While it is interesting to extend Oliphant's work on genetic algorithms to 2 dimensions, it sheds little new light on the subject.
What would have been far more interesting, especially from the Brookings Institute's charter, and from Epstein's position of responsibility for defense policy analysis there, would have been to do a genuine investigation of cultural transmission in the presence of genetic selection as well as cultural selection:
Then study under what conditions genotypes arise that tend to transmit 'cooperator culture' while they, themselves, transmit 'defector genes'.
The above extensions to Oliphant's one dimensional gaussian model should be sufficient to illuminate the nature of such 'meta-defection', although I'm sure variations and elaborations on his minimalist environmental model would become obviously interesting in short order.
Seastead this.
Oh don't worry about the moderation, theres always meta-moderation so who's counting
Back to the plot
an individual ("The Mule") was able to cause a significant upset to the plan
The Mule caused a significant upset to the plan, but only in the short term. Between Seldon anticipating his Plan A failing somewhere along the lines, and all the Gaia stuff later on the Mule didn't really upset the applecart.
Of course in RL you're on the right lines.
To add to your statement what applies to groups does not apply to individuals and that individual is sufficiently powerful, then unpredictable events occur.
...Through stupid people unpredictable events occur, as you should never underestimate the power of stupid people in groups.