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Christopher Symonds
Hello, I'm TV's Christopher Symonds. You might know me from such classics as “2 and a Half Threads”, “Special Victims Unit Testing”, and the mind-bending movie “Exception”.
News
22-Oct-2014 08:54:16PM-0600
Finished reading Maley's paper in preparation for my defense next class. Having never defended a paper in this manner before, I'm not sure what to expect. My brother's recommendation is to put my back to the corner, drop the paper at my feet, and swing my arms around wildly, all while making extremely loud bird calls to confuse would-be attackers. So between that and carefully studying the paper, I should hopefully be able to put up a good defense.
16-Oct-2014 09:56:31PM-0600
Yesterday, I stopped by Professor Ackley's office, who provided me with some code to output statistical data from our atoms. I created a walkthrough page on the wiki to provide the code to others who might also need the same capabilities. Now to get some preliminary data from my Sytizens.
04-Oct-2014 09:26:47PM-0600
Ok one more post. I adjusted the settings of the parochial non-altruists so that I'm no longer getting lock-up, or if I do, it doesn't last, and will eventually erode and things continue to move. After playing around with this configuration in a 4-up match, it's clear that Parochial Altruists are the hands-down dominant category, followed by PNAs, then NPAs, and the NPNAs dead last. Not sure there's anything terribly exciting about that, but…
I just adjusted the resources down a bit and set off a 1v1 match and it has been the hands-down most exciting run I've watched yet. 8 kAEPS in and it's still going. I'm getting lock-ups that eventually get eroded away and these two guys are slugging it out hard. I wish I had recorded it. I also really wish I had statistical output so that I knew what the heck was going on. Hopefully that feature will come soon.
**edit: Ah, blue finally won at 9.1 kAEPS. Bravo, blue.
04-Oct-2014 04:40:31PM-0600
This week, I'm lumping my updates into one post.
Researcher Presentation
I finished up my researcher presentation on Tom Ray last Monday after class. I'm glad I picked him, he's had a fascinating career, and I'm looking forward to telling everyone about him.
Project
I wrote an abstract and expected outcome a few days ago, and I was sure to use as many $2 words as I could to make it sound good. However, I've already blown my expected outcome out of the water because…
Paralta
So it turns out that the hunch was correct that the gridlock of elements that kept occurring in my simulation runs were made up of predominently the same category. In fact it essentially entirely one category, but not the Non-Parochial, Non-Altruists as I'd suspect, and no not the Parochial Altruists, either. It is, to my surprise, entirely the Parochial Non-Altruists (the ones who steal from outgroups, at potential cost to themselves.)
After looking at their behavior, I suppose I understand why; the consequences of failure aren't too bad. So in the grand scheme of abilities, they have a much smaller chance of dying than the others, so I need to nerf their advantage a little bit. However, I feel that I am arbitrarily doing this, and need to figure out some way of making the behavior a realistic one, even if it confers a greater advantage. However, at this point one is as realistic as the other, so I suppose I will just attempt adjustments until I am at least no longer getting gridlock.
Project
Profile on Dr. Thomas Ray
I've selected researcher Tom Ray as my subject for the researcher profile section of the course.
Project Idea(s)
| Altruism | I am interested in studying the effects of altruism in the form of resource sharing between individuals in a population living in a given state of scarcity. Is there a 'sweet spot' of this kind of altruism that benefits the species as a whole that arises as a function of a given level of scarcity? How does one measure that kind of thing? Is it possible to model an environment of scarcity in a quantifiable way that is useful? Possible paper title might be “Optimal Altruism in Scarcity Systems' or 'Hey brother, can you spare an artificial dime?' |
|---|---|
| FrobWorld+ | Other possible topics include FrobWorld+, wherein we take peaceful frobs and put weapons in their hands, give them a sense of tribalism, maybe even allow them to specialize as gatherers, warriors, etc. Other wishlist capabilities include hoarding and resource management, communication, breeding and genetic crossover as opposed to spontaneous mitosis wherein the genetic propagation relies solely on mutation for evolution. Pack them with as much human-like capabilities we can give them within time constraints and see how their evolutionary paths unfold, and if we converge on any particular genetic pattern as dominantly successful. This is a bit weaker as I'm not sure what specific questions we might ask of this, rather it's a “This sounds like it would be fun, let's do it and see if something interesting falls out of it” kind of thing. |
Third Idea
The previous two ideas are, as you can see, both inside the box. This idea space is reserved for an idea that is outside the box. And when I've thought of one, I will put it here.
Comments
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