[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Nathan F Yospe]

On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Matthew Mihaly wrote:

:On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Jo Dillon wrote:

:>   I'll see if I can dig it out. It's about time I handed it to the Devmud
:> people anyway ;) I believe there have been economists working on agent-
:> based simulations - I don't suppose you've heard anything about that?
:> I'd bet their code's a lot more sophisticated than mine!

:Yes, in fact, JC and I posted about this sort of thing either yesterday or
:the day before (ahh, how they blur together). The Santa Fe Institute in
:New Mexico was formed as an inter-disciplinary organization in order to
:study complexity. It managed to attract some of the absolute top people in
:their fields, like Murray Gell-Mann (Nobel winner in particle physics I
:believe), Phil Anderson (Nobel winner for his work in solid-state physics,
:itself sort of a field studying emergent properties of particle physics),
:Ken Arrow (Nobel winner in economics), and a bunch of brilliant young guys
:who had previously been working largely independently on ideas like
:genetic algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks, classifier
:algorithms, co-evolution, "self-organized criticality", etc. 

Er... I'm pretty sure Anderson's Nobel wasn't in solid state. Gill-Mann,
in spite of having been one of the most brilliant quantum mechanists the
last fifty years have produced, is widely viewed as a consequence of too
much too fast... most of the field thinks he popped a gasket.

On the other hand, I rather liked his last two books regarding the Santa
Fe institute.

Anderson, if I recall correctly, was closer to physical optics...

:Their first major product was commissioned by the head of Citicorp, who
:was disgusted that Citicorp's in-house economicsts (presumably using

<snip>

:So, they got to work, and basically the Santa Fe approach, instead of
:emphasizing static equilibrium points, decreasing returns, and perfect
:rationality (neo-classical view), they emphasized rationality that is
:bounded, increasing returns, and evolution and learning. Basically, they

<snip>

:Pines, and some others. It's volume 5 in the Santa Fe Institute Studies in
:the Sciences of Complexity and contains a summary of the institute's first
:large economics meeting sometime in the late 80s. Published by
:Addison-Wesley.

Unfortunately, it remains, in practical terms, untested. But, yes, it is
a damn sight more reliable than classical economics, by default.

:I think it would be beyond excellent if a mud was ever coded with truly
:sophisticated adaptive agents, though I'm not really sure how much I'd
:want this to happen in a for-profit game. Who knows what kind of
:structures they would form. Would they invent central banking and options
:trading, or would they come up with entirely new ways of expressing
:economic motives and desires?

I don't know, and have no intent of doing this *specifically* with econ,
but... a lot of Physmud's AI is based on adaptive agents. I've described
a lot of it in previous posts, in bits and pieces... this is what drives
my predictive long-term regional updates in scales and regions that have
not been investigated for long periods. Again, I've been meaning to make
five huge posts on Physmud... the update (predictive) engine, the region
relation (load/unload) system, the information permeation methods (which
are also tied to the update engine, the distributed client/server, and a
general analysis of my input/output NN fed lexical monster of a NLP. I'm
also considering a brief set of early client GUIs. (The NLP is on client
only, for those of you that I have failed to communicate this with, but,
for the benifit of the game AIs, it also parses speach, and sends a good
ten possible interpretations (with simple biasing) to the game, and text
to a log server and directly to other clients...
--

Nathan F. Yospe - Born in the year of the tiger, riding it forever after
University of Hawaii at Manoa, Dept of Physics, second year senior (joy)
(On Call) Associate Algorithm Developer, Textron Systems Corp, Maui Ops.
yospe#hawaii.edu http://www2.hawaii.edu/~yospe Non commercial email only




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