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--- people:chris_symonds:project [2014/09/13 19:25] – [Questions Examined] csymonds
+++ people:chris_symonds:project [2014/09/13 19:46] (current) – [Questions Examined] csymonds
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 ====Questions Examined====
-While the model I am attempting to create has roots in the work of Choi and Bowles, I am hoping to model a pre-paleolithic society; one more nomadic wherein the in-groups do not pool and share resources, nor do they engage in outright warfare with other groups. Rather, the interactions among agents are restricted to the individual territory of the agents themselves, reflecting a period before social coagulation took hold with early hominids, roughly 3-5 million years ago. ((Edward H. Judge & John W. Langdon. //Connections: A World History, Combined Volume, 2/E//. Pearson; 2 edition 2011)) This muddies the waters a little bit on what it exactly means to be an in-group, though Judge and Langdon point out that the process of forming groups was gradual would be on the order of millions of years before societies were more firmly established.
+While the model I am attempting to create has roots in the work of Choi and Bowles, I am hoping to model a pre-paleolithic society; one more nomadic wherein the in-groups do not pool and share resources, nor do they engage in outright warfare with other groups. Rather, the interactions among agents are restricted to the individual territory of the agents themselves, reflecting a period before social coagulation took hold with early hominids, roughly 3-5 million years ago. ((Edward H. Judge & John W. Langdon. //Connections: A World History, Combined Volume, 2/E//. Pearson; 2 edition 2011)) This muddies the waters a little bit on what it exactly means to be an in-group, though Judge and Langdon point out that the process of forming groups was gradual and it would be on the order of millions of years before societies were more firmly established.
-I suspect that altruism and parochialism were both still in the very early stages of development in this period and it would be interesting to see how each might have come about, and what the conditions were that made their appearance more probable.
+I suspect that altruism and parochialism were both still in the very early stages of development in this period and it would be interesting to see how each might have come about, and what the conditions were that made their appearance more probable. Will the simulation results reflect what Choi and Bowles propose, that Altruism and Parochialism reinforce each other?
+===So What? (Computer Science Edition)===
+So what is the computational tie-in to all of this? Why do we, as computer scientists, care about how altruism and parochialism came about under pressure? And under traditional computational paradigms, these are legitimate questions. Processes don't attack other processes for the purposes of resource competition (they do for other reasons). They might be included in an group, and a group of processes belonging to a virus might very well be considered an out-group, but does the concept of sacrifice mean anything to a computational process? I would argue no, under the traditional computational paradigm of efficiency-first computing, the concept of altruism doesn't apply.
+Under robust-first computing however, under the resource-limited confines of the MFM, it might. If a program needs space to operate, it may very quickly need to start making sacrifices if that space is limited. If it is competing for space with other process groups, it may need to be aggressive. What constitutes the fitness of a program in a robust-first environment? Perhaps Parochial Altruism might be a successful behavior to engage in.