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Superrational
In economics and game theory, a participant is considered to have superrationality (or renormalized rationality) if they have perfect rationality (and thus maximize their utility) but assume that all other players are superrational too and that a superrational individual will always come up with the same strategy as any other superrational thinker when facing the same problem. Applying this definition, a superrational player playing against a superrational opponent in a prisoner's dilemma will cooperate while a rationally self-interested player would defect. This decision rule is not a mainstream model within the game theory and was suggested by Douglas Hofstadter in his article, series, and book ''Metamagical Themas'' – reprinted in: as an alternative type of rational decision making different from the widely accepted game-theoretic one. Superrationality is a form of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative, and is closely related to the concept of Kantian equilibrium propos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Categorical Imperative
The categorical imperative (german: kategorischer Imperativ) is the central philosophical concept in the deontological moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Introduced in Kant's 1785 '' Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals'', it is a way of evaluating motivations for action. It is best known in its original formulation: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."It is standard to also reference the '' Akademie Ausgabe'' of Kant's works. The ''Groundwork'' occurs in the fourth volume. Citations throughout this article follow the format 4:x. For example, the above citation is taken from 4:421. According to Kant, sentient beings occupy a special place in creation, and morality can be summed up in an imperative, or ultimate commandment of reason, from which all duties and obligations derive. He defines an ''imperative'' as any proposition declaring a certain action (or inaction) to be necessary. Hypothetical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Platonia Dilemma
In the platonia dilemma introduced in Douglas Hofstadter's book ''Metamagical Themas'', an eccentric trillionaire gathers 20 people together, and tells them that if one and only one of them sends them a telegram (reverse charges) by noon the next day, that person will receive a billion dollars. If they receive more than one telegram, or none at all, no one will get any money, and cooperation between players is forbidden. In this situation, the superrational thing to do is to send a telegram with probability 1/20. Luring Lottery A similar game, referred to as a "Luring Lottery", was actually played by the editors of ''Scientific American'' in the 1980s. – reprinted in: To enter the contest once, readers had to send in a postcard with the number "1" written on it. They were also explicitly permitted to submit as many entries as they wished by sending in a single postcard bearing the number of entries they wished to submit. The prize was one million dollars divided by the total num ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prisoner's Dilemma
The Prisoner's Dilemma is an example of a game analyzed in game theory. It is also a thought experiment that challenges two completely rational agents to a dilemma: cooperate with their partner for mutual reward, or betray their partner ("defect") for individual reward. This dilemma was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher while working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker appropriated the game and formalized it by structuring the rewards in terms of prison sentences and named it "prisoner's dilemma". William Poundstone in his 1993 book ''Prisoner's Dilemma'' writes the following version:Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to two years in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each pris ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metamagical Themas
''Metamagical Themas'' is an eclectic collection of articles that Douglas Hofstadter wrote for the popular science magazine ''Scientific American'' during the early 1980s. The anthology was published in 1985 by Basic Books. The volume is substantial in size and contains extensive notes concerning responses to the articles and other information relevant to their content. (One of the notes—page 65—suggested memetics for the study of memes.) Major themes include: self-reference in memes, language, art and logic; discussions of philosophical issues important in cognitive science/AI; analogies and what makes something similar to something else (specifically what makes, for example, an uppercase letter 'A' recognizable as such); and lengthy discussions of the work of Robert Axelrod on the prisoner's dilemma, as well as the idea of superrationality. The concept of superrationality, and its relevance to the Cold War, environmental issues and such, is accompanied by notes on e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'' won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction"General Nonfiction" . ''Past winners and finalists by category''. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved March 17, 2012. and a (at that time called The American Book Award) for Science. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes what's viewed as basic elements in the economy, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyzes the economy as a system where production, consumption, saving, and investment interact, and factors affecting it: employment of the resources of labour, capital, and land, currency inflation, economic growth, and public policies that have impact on these elements. Other broad distinctions within economics include those between positive economics, describing "what is", and normative economics, advocating "what ought to be"; between economic theory and applied economics; between ratio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dominant Strategy
In game theory, strategic dominance (commonly called simply dominance) occurs when one strategy is better than another strategy for one player, no matter how that player's opponents may play. Many simple games can be solved using dominance. The opposite, intransitivity, occurs in games where one strategy may be better or worse than another strategy for one player, depending on how the player's opponents may play. Terminology When a player tries to choose the "best" strategy among a multitude of options, that player may compare two strategies A and B to see which one is better. The result of the comparison is one of: * B is equivalent to A: choosing B always gives the same outcome as choosing A, no matter what the other players do. * B strictly dominates A: choosing B always gives a better outcome than choosing A, no matter what the other players do. * B weakly dominates A: choosing B always gives at least as good an outcome as choosing A, no matter what the other players do, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mixed Strategy
In game theory, a player's strategy is any of the options which they choose in a setting where the outcome depends ''not only'' on their own actions ''but'' on the actions of others. The discipline mainly concerns the action of a player in a game affecting the behavior or actions of other players. Some examples of "games" include chess, bridge, poker, monopoly, diplomacy or battleship. A player's strategy will determine the action which the player will take at any stage of the game. In studying game theory, economists enlist a more rational lens in analyzing decisions rather than the psychological or sociological perspectives taken when analyzing relationships between decisions of two or more parties in different disciplines. The strategy concept is sometimes (wrongly) confused with that of a move. A move is an action taken by a player at some point during the play of a game (e.g., in chess, moving white's Bishop a2 to b3). A strategy on the other hand is a complete algorithm for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Icosahedron
In geometry, an icosahedron ( or ) is a polyhedron with 20 faces. The name comes and . The plural can be either "icosahedra" () or "icosahedrons". There are infinitely many non- similar shapes of icosahedra, some of them being more symmetrical than others. The best known is the (convex, non-stellated) regular icosahedron—one of the Platonic solids—whose faces are 20 equilateral triangles. Regular icosahedra There are two objects, one convex and one nonconvex, that can both be called regular icosahedra. Each has 30 edges and 20 equilateral triangle faces with five meeting at each of its twelve vertices. Both have icosahedral symmetry. The term "regular icosahedron" generally refers to the convex variety, while the nonconvex form is called a ''great icosahedron''. Convex regular icosahedron The convex regular icosahedron is usually referred to simply as the ''regular icosahedron'', one of the five regular Platonic solids, and is represented by its Schläfli symbol , co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moral Realism
Moral realism (also ethical realism) is the position that ethical sentence (linguistics), sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-moral nihilism, nihilist form of Cognitivism (ethics), ethical cognitivism (which accepts that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be evaluated as true or false) with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism (which denies that moral propositions refer to objective facts), error theory (which denies that any moral propositions are true); and non-cognitivism (which denies that moral sentences express propositions at all). Within moral realism, the two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism. Many philosophers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evidential Decision Theory
Evidential decision theory (EDT) is a school of thought within decision theory which states that, when a rational agent is confronted with a set of possible actions, one should select the action with the highest ''news value'', that is, the action which would be indicative of the best outcome in expectation if one received the "news" that it had been taken. In other words, it recommends to "do what you most want to learn that you will do." EDT contrasts with causal decision theory (CDT), which prescribes taking the action that will causally produce the best outcome. While these two theories agree in many cases, they give different verdicts in certain philosophical thought experiments. For example, EDT prescribes taking only one box in Newcomb's paradox, while CDT recommends taking both boxes. Formal description In a 1976 paper, Allan Gibbard and William Harper distinguished between two kinds of expected utility maximization. EDT proposes to maximize the expected utility of actions ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
