On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 11:35:13AM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 19 Jan 2014, at 23:14, Russell Standish wrote: > >Well yes, that is certainly arguable, and I'm indeed somewhat critical > >of the notion myself. But is not "my concept" - it is the accepted > >concept from economics, game theory, decision theory, and artificial > >intelligence - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_agent. > > > >"a rational agent is an agent which has clear preferences, models > >uncertainty via expected values, and always chooses to perform the > >action with the optimal expected outcome for itself from among all > >feasible actions." > > > >If you think I am miscontruing anything on that page, I'd appreciate > >it being pointed out. (note the term "utility" is called "preferences" > >in the Wikipedia article. > > I would not trust wikipedia on such topics. Nor probably any > dictionary, which seems to me to be deeply irrational when > addressing the notion of rationality, or are just taking the > definition in fashion for some school of thought. >
Sure - you're welcome to provide a citation to an alterative formulation, and we can debate that, but the Wikipedia version appears to be consistent with how the concept is used in the literature, and also with a sample of pages from Plato.stanford. I will accept evidence of a different interpretation where it is clearly widely used. I don't see such evdence at present. Making up your own definition doesn't count :). -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.
