On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 09:17:00AM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > >> From the responses I've received on this list, I don't think people > >are using the term rational in the same way it is used in > >economics. Flipping a coin is never rational, although it may well be > >the best thing to do. > Random moves are optimum in many games and provably so. What meaning of > 'rational' are you using? > > Brent >
The usual one from philosophy and economics theory. See eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality. Note partiularly the first sentence: > In philosophy, rationality is the characteristic of any action, belief, or > desire, that makes their choice a necessity. A rational agent is neither free, nor random. Somewhat unstated in that article is that rational agents have sufficient computing capacity to perform the reasoning necessary to determine the optimum choice - there is no flipping of coins to determine choices. In economics, it is also assumed that agents have perfect knowledge of the market. This would be public knowledge, of course, clairvoyance would be ruled out. Each agent knows what every other agent has done in the past, but not what they're planning to do next, for instance. I can see that in other fields, the concept of rationality with incomplete information is deployed, so I may have overstressed the complete information bit. But its all a load of rubbish anyway. Real agents cannot be rational - they must have bounded reasoning capability, and real time decision constraints. The leads to the conclusion that a certain amount of irrationality is a good thing. If you're interested, I can refer you to a nice little paper of mine looking at a traditional toy model from economics: http://www.arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0411006 Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.
