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Interactive introduction to game theory and trust
- sva_ 5y agoThis has been posted a couple of times, also very recently. But never got a lot of discussion. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fncase.me%2Ftrust%2F https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fncase.me%2Ftrust%2F
- gota 5y agoI'm certain it was on one of such previous posts that I found it (and played it) And, as chance would have it, this is where I first heard Komiku's "It's time for Adventure!" (the song that plays in the intro). It has since been what I listen to when programming when silence is not an option
- bcg361 5y agoI can't seem to find the exact song, can you link it?
- gota 5y agoIf I recall correctly that's number 13 "Bleu": https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Its_time_for_adventure_ https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Its_time_for_adven... Check out the other Volumes too, they're all great
- yamrzou 5y agoSame for his other game "We Become What We Behold" https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22wbwwb%22%20&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- scns 5y agoThis is awesome. Did it around a year ago. Eye opening. I irge everyone to check it out.
- amirmaleki 5y agoThis person is fabulous... Followed and loved their games for nearly half a decade now.
- Apfel 5y agoAbsolutely agreed - their game about spacial repetition is my go-to conversion tool for friends and family: https://ncase.me/remember/ https://ncase.me/remember/
- amirmaleki 5y agoAwesome! I've never read it and I just needed it, thanks for your recommendation.
- raxxorrax 5y agoIt is a variable that would make game theory much more applicable.
- vishnugupta 5y agoI’ve played this and it’s fantastic. Do play it to the end. I found it extremely insightful and their observations connected long standing disparate dots for me. It’s as if a big jumbled up puzzle suddenly clicked into place.
- lvxferre 5y agoI've seen this once. But just now I noticed something: >the fewer "repeat interactions" there are, the more distrust will spread. Doesn't this explain quite well why big internet communities devolve into a cesspool? I'm not behaving like a jerk (or worse, a moron) if I know people around me will recognise and avoid me, but as the odds of that happening get closer to zero, it becomes more advantageous to fling shit.
- paulgb 5y agoI think you’re spot on, but a counterexample seems to be Twitter, where both low- and high-profile accounts engage in shit-flinging because it evokes reactions, and the algorithm doesn’t discriminate between positive and negative engagement.
- HumblyTossed 5y agoBecause of the character limit, I think Twitter is more conducive to emotional outbursts (both positive and negative, but considering that it takes a lot more emotional energy to be positive than negative we see more negativity) due to the quick nature of it. It only takes a couple seconds to pound out 250 chars.
- hashkb 5y agoMy emotional outbursts can easily be thousands of words. There's no way to actually express emotions on Twitter. I suspect that's part of the reason for all the images and memes and links to articles. Edit: and bitter arguments.
- lvxferre 5y agoThe character limit introduces a lot of misunderstandings.
- ziml77 5y agoThis is my experience with Twitter. There isn't enough space to write out something in a way that minimizes the chances of misunderstandings. However, I think a big part of the problem is that those explanations are needed in the first place. Why do we so easily jump to awful interpretations? That's how you end up with rage that quickly spreads and even worsens as context for what the person said is lost or the quote isn't repeated at all but instead just the bad-faith interpretation is passed around. The effects of that go beyond just the awful emotional impact. People get fired for that kind of controversy. (I hesitate to call it "cancel culture" because of the implications in that term of who's canceling who).
- _448 5y agoThe outcome of the various games depend on the way rewards are distributed. If the reward for bad behaviour is high, obviously the bad guys are going to win. This is evident in the 5 step "The Evolution of Distrust". Try reducing the rewards for bad behaviour and increasing for good behaviour :) So, moral of the story is: Reward good behaviour.
- GranularRecipe 5y agoAnd punish bad behaviour, reduce miscommunication / improve coordination.
- sva_ 5y agoBut you don't know ahead of time who will cooperate, and who will cheat. The rule was "if you spend 1 coin, the other player gets 3 coins". If you change it to "if you spend 1 coin, the other player gets only 2 coins if they cheated", the game isn't fair anymore. Or am I misunderstanding something?
- lvxferre 5y agoOther morals: Being "nice" (copycat) is not the same as being a "sucker" (cooperator). Suckers don't make things worse just for themselves, but for everyone around them, by encouraging bad behaviour. Even then, people make mistakes, so don't hold grudges for too long. They won't lead you very far.
- cycomanic 5y agoJust based on the game, suckers are not really the problem. If you turn down interactions for example even the copycat (or weak copycat) looses against the all cheat. So it's not that the always coorporate creates the bad situation.
- lvxferre 5y agoThat's because the copycat, in the first interaction, works exactly the same as the cooperator. And the outcome of that first interaction becomes more important if there are less of them. The problem I see only pops up when there are more interactions - when the player knows the other will cheat, but still decides to cooperate.
- a-dub 5y agowhat about sequence learning minmax cat? mmm. or just play nice.
- 123pie123 5y agothere should be another character similar to the "copy kitten" co-operate first, then if the other person cheats once then cheat back always
- hrishi 5y ago"Peace broke out" is one of my favorite openings to the Monty Python Funniest Joke in the world sketch. This is well done!
- corobo 5y agoPut a wrench in the machine to see what happens
- adamnemecek 5y agoGame theory, just like essentially everything in math, physics and probability, and cs is about adjoints, norms, and fixed points https://github.com/adamnemecek/adjoint/ https://github.com/adamnemecek/adjoint/ Nash equilibrium is a fixed point.
- guerrilla 5y agoThat pages needs a lot of work before you try presenting to people who aren't into category theory. I know it's not but to someone who doesn't know the jargon it'll just looks like crankery. Someone who doesn't already know what you're thinking isn't going to be able to get anything out of your comment and that braindump in relation to the OP.
- adamnemecek 5y agoThat’s not the experience I’ve had. I have shown it to people who were not into category theory who got it fine. Also it goes beyond CT, CT unlike say linear logic isn’t closed under norm.
- sodality2 5y agoPlayed this sometime in the past and had a lot of fun. I did not want to, given the 30 minute play time estimate, but I ended up playing the anxiety demo [0] on the same site, and spending about an hour total.... it was incredibly informative and eye-opening. [0]: https://ncase.me/anxiety-demo/ https://ncase.me/anxiety-demo/
- Bodell 5y agoI just finished playing this and I wasn’t particularly impressed. It seemed to be saying that your anxiety is controlling you when you choose not to use, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tinder. I don’t believe that using social media apps is a necessary or meaningful thing to do with your life. Nor do I think it’s fair to imply that people who choose not to engage on those platforms are suffering from anxiety disorders. In fact it often seems more the opposite way around. However, I’m not entirely sure that this was the intended insinuation. Yet it’s hard to read anything else into it since its about a girl trying to engage with her friends on her phone across these various platforms and being stopped by the ‘anxiety wolf’. She even gets her health dinged for sharing a news story, which to some extent could be viewed as engaging with reality. Engaging with reality can most assuredly cause anxiety, however I don’t really view this as improper. I don’t believe that mental health should be thought of as a framing or mindset one has to the extent that it frames reality away. I.E. I may feel better if I pretend covid is not real though I am not making a healthy choice if I do.
- inkblotuniverse 5y agoHow's a news story reality, and social media not? News stories (especially the sorts you'd share on social media) are usually virtual, detached from reality.
- Bodell 5y agoI was not expressing a critical view of news media simply because it is not contextual in this situation. The “game” is actually very non-specific as to what the “news” is - or anything else for that matter. So, I was simply applying something like covid or global warming to it in order to show that the generalized premise of the game does not hold as a very insightful view of human being’s relationships with their anxiety.
- Korpocalypse 5y agoSo beautiful. Love to see ancient wisdom proven mathematically. Bravo!
- augustohp 5y agoI cannot recommend "The evolution of cooperation" (Robert Axelrod), the source for the game, enough. It is written by a journalist, so it reads well, about a Math doctorate applying the theory in other areas. Richard Dawkings vets it for biology and writes the foreword in the book.
- nanwells 5y agoWhen I started programming, the first mistake I encountered was ignoring the spacing rules in Python, thus creating errors even though the code was correct.
- mejutoco 5y agoWhat a great game. It would be interesting to see what happens when the types „slide“ towards the next personality (copycat into copykittens into always cooperative) as they get possitive feedback (and the opposite for always cheater).
- partomniscient 5y agoWhat happens if you add another level of meta to it, and the object of the game is to avoid complete randomness/undecidability but also for the game to go on for as many iterations, ideally with the lowest amount of mistakes(/entropy?) and defections/cheats. i.e stuff is happening, there's a lot of predictability but no easily determinable stabilisation endpoint?
- mcguire 5y agoInteresting: In the "change the payoffs" version, if you set the cooperate/cooperate to +2 (or +1) and change the cheat/cheat punishment to -3 or -4 or higher, you get a situation that alternates between a greater or lesser number of cheaters and cooperators. The copycats get eaten instantly.
- bilater 5y agoGorgeous design and a brilliant way to show case game theory
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoIn the sandbox, if you change the payoff of both parties cheating to -5, the angelic cooperator seems to win in most simulations. In a way, this makes sense: if the penalty when both parties cheat is harsher than the upside of swindling your partner, "trust at all costs" wins out! But on a societal level, I suppose this means that if you want to optimize for do-gooders, you should punish failure harshly, no matter which party is responsible...