Thank you, Roger. I like this. Merle On Apr 11, 2012, at 4:59 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/04/04/rspb.2012.0206 > has made quite a splash in the news. > > The high levels of intelligence seen in humans, other primates, certain > cetaceans and birds remain a major puzzle for evolutionary biologists, > anthropologists and psychologists. It has long been held that social > interactions provide the selection pressures necessary for the evolution of > advanced cognitive abilities (the ‘social intelligence hypothesis’), and in > recent years decision-making in the context of cooperative social > interactions has been conjectured to be of particular importance. Here we use > an artificial neural network model to show that selection for efficient > decision-making in cooperative dilemmas can give rise to selection pressures > for greater cognitive abilities, and that intelligent strategies can > themselves select for greater intelligence, leading to a Machiavellian arms > race. Our results provide mechanistic support for the social intelligence > hypothesis, highlight the potential importance of cooperative behaviour in > the evolution of intelligence and may help us to explain the distribution of > cooperation with intelligence across taxa. > > The paper is open access. > > They evolve a population of neural networks that play the Prisoners' Dilemma > or the Snowdrift Game amongst themselves, with fitness computed as the > payoffs in the game rounds minus the size of your own neural network. With > the result that the neural networks _can_ evolve to become larger over time, > the populations _can_ acquire a diversity in strategies that becomes a > selection pressure for increasingly clever strategies for playing the games. > > -- rec -- > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
