Strategies of the Artificial

Pre-Complexity

Third, and perhaps most important of all, Weaver wrote an article in 1947 that pioneered the notion that science had crossed a watershed sometime after 1900, away from problems of “simplicity” and into the arena of what he called “disorganized complexity.” The harbinger of the new approach was…

Busemeyer, Jerome R.;

The terms risk and uncertainty in the title of this chapter arise from a distinction that economists make between risky and uncertain situations, the former when probabilities of the outcomes in a situation are known (and not 0 or 1) and the latter when the probabilities are not well…

On Empathy

Even though our abilities to mentalize and to empathize are mostly used in concert when we try to understand other people’s intentions, beliefs, desires, and feelings, preliminary evidence from studies of populations of patients with marked social deficits, like those with autism or psychopathy (see Box 27.1)…

Simplicity and Complexity

Unfortunately, as a society we tend to regard “complex” and “intelligent” as words that go together. In actuality, intelligent solutions are often the simplest ones. Furthermore, it is the simplest solutions that are often the hardest to find. Most of the algorithms in this book are…

Note on Origins of Threading

Interesting bit of history there, though not surprising to anyone having to deal with GUI programming in languages like Java.

It is common in modern systems to provide capability for a sort of miniprocess, known as a thread. A thread represents a piece…

Anthromorphic Problems

The more we learn about nonhuman intelligence, however, the more we find that abilities previously thought to be uniquely human are not. Many of the abilities listed earlier have been found to varying degrees in the great apes. For example, it was thought until the 1960s that humans alone…

Excerpt on Multi-Agent Planning

Planning is important to an agent because its current and upcoming choices of actions can intentionally establish, or accidentally undo, the conditions that later actions depend upon to reach desirable states of the world. Hence, planning in single-agent systems is…

One Big Outline and Two Small Derivations

Over the last few days, I have successfully created a 30-page, single-spaced LaTex document describing the core problems in strategic theory that computational modeling would address. This is an enormous breakthrough and achievement for me (a broken record…