Tomorrow

[Nick Thompson]

Frank,

I am glad for you interest.  We took a couple runs at it after you left.  Mike bludgeoned my Chess Model to death by simply pointing out that we dont KNOW how a chess game is going to come out.    Dede suggested we start with the game of life, a place where I have wanted to start,  but we all agreed that it is hard to see how this model accomodates an enviornment.  I wonder if we had thought about Kaufman's CA's (?) and the phase transitions at a given degree of connectedness (?), dont these have certain self healing properties so that one could perturb the space with ouside influences and it would still tend to return to its original path.  The thing about development is that it is so chaotic at one level but so predictable at the next level up.  So In the end, I offered the DOG AND THE FRISBEE MODEL OF DEVELOPMENT.  Think of the frisbee as the organism. the kid who throws the frisbee as the environment, and dog as the developmental system.  No matter which way the kid throws the frisbee, the dog catches it and brings it back.  Some Dog!

Surely SOMEBODY on the list can do better than THAT!!!!

nICK

NIck .  

Nicholas S. Thompson
Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
[hidden email]
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/
[hidden email]


----- Original Message -----
From: Frank Wimberly
To: [hidden email];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 4/29/2005 1:04:51 PM
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Tomorrow


Nick,

Sorry there wasn’t an opportunity to talk about this this morning.  Keep me informed, please.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly      140 Calle Ojo Feliz     Santa Fe, NM 87505
[phone] or [phone] (cell)
[hidden email] or [hidden email] or [hidden email]



-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2005 2:29 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: [FRIAM] Tomorrow

All --

Since my sabbatical is nearing its end, i wanted to get some feed back on some ideas we have been moving a head on while I still have time to tweak them.

Owen, Steve, and I, with assists from Carl and Frank, have been working on a new strategy in the PD game that is an improvement on Tit4Tat.   Unlike Tit4Tat it is an unconditional altruist, but breaks up a partnership if the partner isnt "nice".   Owen has written a magnificent applet and I have been running experiments on it .  OUr new strategy bests T4T in most situations and suggests thereby a less onerous basis for cooperation than recognition and reciprocity.   The applet, however, is so versitile that it is possible to raise many interesting questions on it, one of which is the effect of changes in the slope of grandients in pd-like games.  We have apparently found that adding numbers to all the cells, multiplying numbers to all the cells, or even squaring the cells has relatively little effect, but cubing completely tilts the balance toward "nasty" strategies.    I am curious to know what anybody thinks of both of these tentative findings.

Carl and I have been struggling  off and on all year with the concept of epigenisis and an attempt to come up with a computer program that displays it.    The word is one of those that if you use it, you have, in the minds of others, anyway, committed yourself to an idealogy about development.  But it also represents a really long standing attempt to engage in some sort of sane discourse about development stripped of the nature-nurture dilusion.   It is the view that development proceeds as a dialectic between the organism at any point and the environment at that point, interacting to produce the oroganism at the next point and the environment at that next point, and so forth.   We are BADLY in need of models that exhibit this property I always think of chess games; Carl as another example which I will let him  tell you about.  But I would really like to come up with about a dozen of them.  Tomorrow would be nice.  I am thinking of a book entitled MODELS OF DEVELOPMENT.  

But I am not pushing.  

Nick


Nicholas S. Thompson
Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
[hidden email]
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/
[hidden email]
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