Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Game Theory 101

First of all the title "game theory" is misleading - Von Neuman's obsession with poker started it - but it has long ago escaped the confines of games. Better would be "interactive theory" perhaps.

Anyway. Very basically the theory studies individuals or groups of agents - active objects with the ability to make 'choices' or at least implement strategies, even if they are rigidly confined by either biology/genetics, society or programming in the case of simulations. I'd argue you can also apply it to interactions between anything and anything as long as the two systems are reactive - ie having effect upon each other - but that might just be me.

Anyway. It cuts the various acts of reciprocation down into two basic responses:

Co-operation: This means things like fair trading practices, fidelity in relationships, alliance in war, adherrence to social contracts, sticking to the rules and not punching your opponent straight in the gonads in boxing matches - that kinda stuff.

Non-co-operation: This can mean anything from sticking a spear or putting a bullet into someone at one extreme, to not quite pulling your full weight in a group endeavor - Imagine 6 guys shouldering a coffin full of very fat guy for example. Bearers 1 through 5 are all putting their backs into it, but bearer 6 is just pretending - at the other end of the scale.

Let's shorten them to co and no to save my tendons.

...Continued...

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

God of War


Over the years I have had many attempts at pulling the rug of religion out from under God's clay feet. Here's another.

I was sitting on the balcony today reading the newspaper. The headline was "something blah-blah senseless killing" And that got me thinking. The killing wasn't important so much as the senselessness of it. As if that adjective was necessary to drive home the evil of the whole business. That the killing served no obvious purpose, was wasteful somehow, achieving no sensible goal.

Then one of the cats that uses our small garden as a stomping ground and occaisional creche tootled by, and for some reason I remembered my vivisectionist/terratologist days. Myself and a bunch of variously snot-nosed kids straight out of highschool sat around a very clean table killing animals, disecting out their wombs and checking their near-term young for chemically induced mutations. That was killing too, but not senseless in that it served a purpose that outweighed its atrocity. And so protected by a sense of a greater good, our daily quota of death lost us not a wink of sleep.

Then I imagined the horror I would inspire if I were to catch that cat, and repeat now the process of disection I had undertaken a thousand times prior. And I wondered how doing it would effect me, without now being able to wear the handy justifying mantle of science. I decided I'd feel pretty bad. Lucky old cat.

...Continued...

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Viz-yoo-al-eyes-eyshuns

After reading books about physics, I sometimes drive myself crazy trying to visualise spacetime in terms approaching the current conventions of quantum.

I start by remembering some of those discovery channel diving programmes. The ones which start with some poor sap with a camera on his head just bobbing up and down in the sea before commencing a dive. The camera repeatedly dips up and down through the surface of the water. I imagine it is a flat, dead calm sea, barely a ripple marring the pristine and endless expanse of water.

Dipping down - a silver sheet, luminous - bobbing back up - a dull grey sheet lit through with sparkles.

Dipping down, bobbing up. Dipping down, bobbing up. Down, up, down.

...Continued...