[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Active and Inactive Currency

[Johnicholas Hines]

On 8/3/07, Caliban Darklock <cdarklock at gmail.com> wrote:
[... snip regarding stores adjusting price points according to profit ...]
> If a genetic algorithm were used for this, you could run it for a
> while before opening the game and make it better. Indeed, this is a
> great opportunity for a middleware offering. Online economies are
> hard, as Raph always says, and if someone could just solve it better
> than anyone else - that could be marketed to other games.

IMHO, genetic algorithms would be a bad choice for this task.
It is a well-studied problem (GAs are appropriate for ill-understood problems).

I would instead use some form of reinforcement learning -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning ,
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/ebook/the-book.html

Otherwise, I agree with Caliban that banks loaning to stores is cool.

Johnicholas