Cooperative networks

[Russ Abbott]

Can anyone refer me to a study of what might be called cooperative networks. I'm think of a network of agents, each of which is more or less autonomous but each of which also often needs the cooperation of other agents to survive and prosper.  Imagine, for example, a workplace environment. People often do favors for each other. There are of course many reasons for that. But among those are the idea that one wants to remain on good terms with others (among other reasons) just in case one may want to call on the other person for a reciprocal favor.  I don't want to make the model too economics-based with the idea of bartering favors. It seems to me that most such networks are much more informal. Yet they still generate cooperation--especially when cooperation is not too costly for the person granting the favor and when the other person is potentially important to the favor-giver's future.

There must be work on such models. Does anyone know of a good reference?

Thanks.

-- Russ

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[Phil Henshaw-2]

So, partly prompted by how it seemed Kauffman got there.    There’s a particularly curious “hiding place” for nature’s accumulative individuality and complex behavior within an otherwise “deterministic” universe obeying universal natural laws…     

 

It’s the somewhat deceptive meaning of “uncertainty”.    If you prove an uncertainty for some outcome it means that actual events will “at most” do one thing, and “at least” do another.    That’s “information” about a probability of behavior, not a specification for individual behaviors.   It specifies the “range of freedom” within the system for non-conforming individual behaviors, which could perhaps lead to accumulatively diverging behaviors.  When you multiply successive uncertainties, the accumulative uncertainties are essentially limitless.

 

Uncertainty is really both a measure of the freedom for individual differences within a system, and at the same time the a measure of the limits beyond which individual differences have no effect.   The range beyond which individual differences have no effect specifies with certainty the potential for deterministic system control.     It means that statistical mechanics is a way of describing where accumulative individual behaviors do not matter, not a statement that they never matter.

 

What is hiding is that within the uncertainties of natural law nature is free to develop accumulative diverging effects, the eventful stuff.    Accumulation is not “vitalism”, but a process that sometimes builds things that “have vitality”, as an emergent property.    In my approach to systems study that’s what watching animated accumulations of events is about.    Observed divergence in accumulating change is a process that shows vitality, and one you can use to closely examine how animated events develop and what becomes of them.

 

d’zzat help…?   ;-)

 

Phil Henshaw  

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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