Re: Waves of Customers?

On 28 May 2006 14:41:38 -0700, "Lance" <lachenicht@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip, previous]

Interesting both people and animals can be trained to emit responses
nearly indistinguishable from genuine random sequences. Some of the
evidence is reviewed in the 2005 "Annual review of Psychology" (article
on indeterminism in the behavioural sciences).

I wonder how they did the training, and how much, for people
and (which) animals.

I wonder how indistinguishable it is, to be "nearly
indistinguishable".

A couple of years ago, I heard a National Public Radio
report on the outcome of a big "paper-scissors-stone"
competition. In Japan, I think, for thousands of dollars.
The eventual winner apparently shocked and psyched his
last opponent by playing "paper" as his final six moves.

I don't know the tourney rules.


The author of that article makes the case that game theory requires,
that sometimes the only way to prevent an opponent accurately guessing
what you will do next is to be able to generate truly random responses.
So there are evolutionary and strategic conditions where the best
strategy is to be truly random. Experiments show that both people and
animals can be trained to detect such circumstances and to repond
randomly to them. I think the movements of a mosquito that one is
trying to swat exemplify this stratgey rather well. If it moved in a
determinate straight line it would be easy to predict where it would be
and rapidly squish it with some handy object. But mosquitos never move
in a predictable fashion...


I think I imagined that mosquitoes, at slow speeds (like, while
near a target) suffered from worse aerodynamic instability than
helicopters do, and had far worse sensor systems.
- or maybe you are suggesting, That's what works for them....

--
Rich Ulrich, wpilib@xxxxxxxx
http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
.

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