Wired News: New Tack Wins Prisoner’s Dilemma
Southampton people have bested Tit-for-Tat in a repeated PD with a somewhat ingenious setup. Although they won fair and square, in a sense they didn’t respect the spirit of the game in which strategies are meant to compete (not their mastermind makers).
TfT’s original success was of course highly dependent on the actual setup of the tournament so beating it in some sort of repeated PD is not so sensational.
Category: Stuff
From the depths
Having other mysterious business in the basement my wife hinted that it might be time for my illustrious Amiga 500 to again see the light of day (as long as it happened somewhere else). So now it’s all packed and ready to make the (entirely manageble) trip to the ITU – complete with semi-functional RGB cable and all. I guess it would attract some streed cred to start of with “This dissertation was written on a pearly white Commodore Amiga“. Then again, maybe not. And it really isn’t all that pearly after all these years in the basement.
But at least we’ll finally get to see who’s the real Speedball II champion. Ice cream, ice cream!
Modding
Degrees of evil
Blogging from your email client is a sweet little feature.
But I’m wondering… it seems that Firefox has no problem reading the pseudo-HTML produced by Outlook. Now, I realize of course that MS-HTML is evil, but how evil is it? Will there be subsequent punishment? Will future generations curse my laziness?
Any thought? Anyone?
(Sent from Outlook)
Do you trust this definition?
It seems that all articles dealing with cheating must start out by saying that the phenomenon has not been studied before. Similarly, it would appear that all researchers working with trust have made a pact to always begin by emphazising the difficult and elusive nature of trust. Trust, or so they claim, is extraordinarily hard to define and particularly multifaceted.
I think there is some mystification going on here. But the confusion is genuine when it comes to whether artifacts or arrangements (such as contracts, police forces etc.) can be said to eliminate the need for trust or should be seen as features which in fact increase trust (in most cases).
The former position (the one most often found in sociological accounts as opposed to economic ones) hinges on the idea that trusting means putting one at the mercy of someone else. But I think there are two problems here:
1) We are led to assume that people trust indiscriminately. But people base their trust on all sorts of signals even they don’t carry around actual contracts.
2) A contract is in fact a way of putting yourselves at the mercy of someone else (you specifically make that person able to sue you should you fail to uphold your part of the bargain). A contract merely makes the mercy aspect work both ways at the same time.
So, I think the latter version makes more sense. If you and I conduct business through a bank then we (can) trust each other even if the bank plays a role in securing that trust.