Artificial Neural Networks Demonstrate the Evolution of Human Intelligence

samazon writes "Ph.D. students at Trinity College in Dublin have constructed an artificial neural network model to demonstrate the Machiavellian intelligence theory — that human intelligence evolved based on the need for social teamwork and indexing a variety of social relationships and statuses. (Abstract) The experiment involved programming a base group of 50 simulated 'brains' which were required to participate one of two classical game theory dilemmas — the Prisoner's Dilemma or the Snowdrift game. Upon completion of either game, each 'brain' produced 'offspring' asexually, with 'brains' that made more advantageous choices during the games programmed to have a better chance to reproduce. A potential random mutation during each generation changed the 'brain's structure, number of neurons, or the strengths of the connections between those neurons,' simulating the evolution of the social brain. After 50,000 generations, the model showed that as cooperation increased, so did the intelligence of the programmed brains." The full paper is available.

Comments

Socialism ve Capitalism?

[dryriver]

If this reasearch is correct, people living under Socialism (where cooperation is high because it is mandatory and forms the very basis of the system) would wind up becoming smarter than people who live under Capitalism (where competition/versus behaviour and everyone-for-himself thinking is closer to being the norm, relatively speaking). This is an interesting result from a politics perspective, because proponents of unfettered, hard-core capitalism often charicature socialist systems/ideologies and the people who live under them as being "unfree" or "living like cattle". Quite a contradiction of views/results, eh? One could infer from this, that hard-core capitalists lack the "cooperative intelligence" that a working socialist system creates to such an extent, that hard-core capitalists cannot even comprehend how a cooperation-socialism based system works - because they never developed a comparable cooperation-based intelligence themselves. Of course it is somewhat silly to arrive at this result purely based on a clever neural-networks exercise that has been conducted by some PhD students. But the hypothesis of capitalists never developing, and thus largely lacking, the cooperative-intelligence needed to live in a socialist society is interesting nevertheless, is it not? It might explain why hard-core capitalists are so keen at swining rhetorical wrecking balls at anything that has even a small whiff of "socialist cooperative model" to it... Like Open Source Software - which is very much a product of cooperative intelligence - for example. To put it more simply, maybe prominent capitalists like Bill Gates cannot help dissing open source efforts like Linux, because they are, from a personal development standpoint, largely unfamiliar with the kind of cooperative-intelligence that a more "socialist" mode of product creation promotes.