Ian Parker wrote > There are the military costs,
Do you realize that you often narrow a discussion down to military issues of the Iraq/Afghanistan theater? Freeloading in social simulation isn't about guys using a plane for free. When you analyse or design a system you look for holes in the system that allow people to exploit it. In complex systems that happens often. Most freeloading isn't much of a problem, just friction, but some have the power to damage the system too much. You have that in the health system, social welfare, subsidies and funding, the usual moral hazard issues in administration, services a.s.o. To come back to AGI: when you hope to design, say, a network of heterogenous neurons (taking Linas' example) you should be interested in excluding mechanisms that allow certain neurons to consume resources without delivering something in return because of the way resource allocation is organized. These freeloading neurons could go undetected for a while but when you scale the network up or confront it with novel inputs they could make it run slow or even break it. > If someone were to come > along in the guise of social simulation and offer a reduction in > these costs the research would pay for itself many times over. SocSim research into "peace and conflict studies" isn't new. And some people in the community work on the Iraq/Afghanistan issue (for the US). > That is the way things should be done. I agree absolutely. We could in > fact > take steepest descent (Calculus) and GAs and combine them together in a > single composite program. This would in fact be quite a useful exercise. Just a note: Social simulation is not so much about GAs. You use agent systems and equation systems. Often you mix both in that you define the agent's behavior and the environment via equations, let the sim run and then describe the results in statistical terms or with curve fitting in equations again. > One last point. You say freeloading can cause o society to disintegrate. > One > society that has come pretty damn close to disintegration is Iraq. > The deaths in Iraq were very much due to sectarian blood letting. > Unselfishness if you like. Unselfishness gone wrong is a symptom, not a cause. The causes for failed states are different. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
