Re: Empirically Measuring Mutualism In Man


"John Edser" <edser@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:dim7pp$u8$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/Zak%20-%20Trust.pdf.
>
> In human business activity trust really matters. Why? Simply because we
> cannot cooperate without it. If we cannot cooperate while we inevitably
> compete we can't take the enormous individual based gains that only
> mutualism can provide.
>
>


Tit for Tat is a highly-effective strategy in game theory for the iterated
prisoner's dilemma. Based on the English saying meaning "equivalent
retaliation" ("tip for tap"), an agent using this strategy will respond in
kind to a previous opponent's action. If the opponent previously was
cooperative, the agent is cooperative. If not, the agent is not.

The success of the strategy, which is largely cooperative, took many by
surprise. In successive competitions various teams produced complex
strategies which attempted to "cheat" in a variety of cunning ways, but Tit
for Tat eventually prevailed in every competition.

Some theorists believe this result may give insight into how groups of
animals (and particularly human societies) have come to live in largely (or
entirely) cooperative societies, rather than the individualistic "red in
tooth and claw" way that might be expected from individual engaged in a
Darwinian struggle.

In a 2004 tournament Tit for Tat was beaten for the first time. A strategy
created by the University of Southampton detected (by means of a
pre-arranged pattern of seemingly random operations) whether its counterpart
was another instance of the Southampton strategy. In cases where the
counterpart is determined not to be using the Southampton strategy, it acts
as a spoiler for the non-Southampton player. In cases where it is, the two
form a master slave relationship, where the slave sacrifice's itself for the
master by always cooperating and letting the master get away with never
cooperating, which maximises the number of points for the master. In the
competition where hundreds of agents are entered and compete against each
other, Southampton entered 60 agents, guaranteeing that a few master agents
gain incredibly high scores by sacrificing the rest of the slaves agents to
the bottom of the score list.
>
>
> John Edser
> Independent Researcher
>
> edser@xxxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
>



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