On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 01:24:59PM -0400, John Clark wrote: > On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 8:04 AM, Russell Standish <[email protected]>wrote: > > > Flipping a coin is never rational, although it may well be the best thing > > to do. > > > > I don't know what to make of that. If X is the best way to achieve a goal > then X is the rational thing to do. The Monte Carlo Algorithm was invented > soon after the end of the second world war specifically to model how a > H-bomb worked, and it in effect flipped a coin millions of times. A > thermonuclear fireball is far too complex to model from first principles so > they generated random inputs for the position and momentum of particles and > then performed deterministic calculations from them and then found the > probability distribution. Without that the H-bomb would not exist. You can > argue if building a H-bomb is a rational goal or not but it you want to > figure out how to build one you've got to flip a coin many millions of > times. > > John K Clark >
No, it is not the rational thing to do. A rational agent has infinite computing capacity and knowledge. A rational agent will know how to simulate an H-bomb exactly without resorting to random approximations. It may well be a boundedly rational thing to do, although I'm not sure this is even true. I haven't studied bounded rationality theory in great depth. Of course all this is shining light on the concept of rationality, which I personally think is rather suspect. Certainly, real people are not rational - they have to get on with their lives. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
