On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 01:58:43PM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote: > Russell, > > I agree that your model here is "theoretical" and does NOT apply to the > actual reality of decision making organisms such as humans. My comments DO > apply to the real world. > > Rational agent theory properly applies to only extremely limited and > non-representative cases in the real world. Specifically it applies to > simple well definable games, checkers would be an example, with well > defined 'best outcomes', and well defined rules that all rational agents > are able to understand in the same way with no ambiguity. But the vast > preponderance of decision making situations in the real world are not thus > well defined and rational agent theory does not apply for the reasons I > explained in my previous post.
Sure. > > Even in a well defined game situation it is quite possible to act > rationally and NOT make the optimal move. E.g. in chess or Go it is > impossible to know what a true optimal move is because optimal moves are > not computable except in the far end game. Nevertheless an agent can act > rationally by choosing the best move he can compute having a limited > understanding of the game. > Such situations are handled by "bounded rationality theory". A fully rational player in chess or go would have god-like computational prowess. > We can understand this better by noting that an IRrational agent is NOT one > that is unable to compute an optimal move from the knowledge he has (if he > is a novice at Go he will simply be unable to compute the best move from > complete knowledge of the board and the rules even IF he is rational). An > IRrational agent CAN compute an optimal move but rather chooses a > SUBoptimal move after computing an optimal move because he has some e.g. > other agenda than winning... Or an IRrational agency computes with faulty > logic. So there are two types of IRrational agent. All the other decision > making is rational..... Or computing the winning outcome takes too long, so it is better to make some decision rather than none at all. Think Chess with a clock. Or being predictable allows competitors to exploit you via arbitrage, or whatever. ... and so on ... Many more than two types of irrational agent. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
