Thursday, October 14, 2004

New Prisoner's Dilemma Winner Sheds Light on US Winners and Losers There's an interesting new winner for the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game described at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65317,00.html : The Southampton group, whose primary research area is software agents, said its strategy involved a series of moves allowing players to recognize each other and act cooperatively. ... The result is that Southampton had the top three performers -- but also a load of utter failures at bottom of the table who sacrificed themselves for the good of the team. ... What was interesting was to see how many colluders you need in a population. It turns out we had far too many -- we would have won with around 20. What interests me is this question: if we see the same result in another game can we assume a similar process has occurred? Consider the game that is the US economy. In the US: The top one percent are now estimated to own between forty and fifty percent of the nation's wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%. Can we now ask if the winners of wealth in the US are playing a cooperative game to win at the expense of individual US citizens? comment[] 8:34:58 AM

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