I've been reading What is Thought? by Eric Baum, a book on the mind by an AI researcher.

For part of the book, Baum describes solving Blocks World problems with a computational economics model. The problem is called Hayek, and it is described in this article. I will just describe the part that is most interesting to me.

The program is implemented as a collection of agents which bid for ownership of the puzzle. Only the owner of the puzzle at any given time is allowed to move its pieces. The puzzle itself is turned into a cash reward when it is solved. Otherwise the world is zero-sum between agents, with money only changing hands during the sales of the puzzle between agents.

Using such rules, evolutionary algorithms are applied to encourage the development of more profitable agents. Successful agents were those able to buy low and sell high, which (assuming accurate pricing) would mean being able to advance the solution the most.

Of course, accurate pricing is a hairy issue; the hardcoding of a good scoring function helps the system a lot.

This is a general parallelization paradigm, where heuristics exist in ecosystems which estimate the value of each other's actions and compete to maximize their own value in that context. An agent's pricing of the puzzle state is subjective to the extent that it is specific to the position of that agent's actions in the chain leading to the solution, and objective to the extent that the other agents see the same chain. I would guess that it is more objective when the action chain is serial and more subjective when many alternative parallel chains exist.

I find Economic AI models cool because they clearly work for humans, and if could be made to work for computers would allow the construction of hybrid cybernetic economies where humans and agents can compete in the same pool.

In a two-way barter trade, two people (1 and 2) exchange two objects (A and B). From the voluntary nature of the transaction, we conclude that both people value their new possessions more than their old; to one person A > B while to the other B > A. These two statements contradict each other, but that's okay because they apply to different people; Person 1 prefers A to B while Person 2 prefers B to A. In fact, this contradiction is what makes trade possible. At this point, there is little temptation to label either person as being wrong.

Now imagine that prior to the trade, the two people had in fact just walked out of the same store, having bought the objects of the trade in the store. At best, if both objects cost the same, the trade seems pointless. In all other cases, one of the people could have done better by just paying less for his post-trade object in the store. This untaken better option prompts us to label the choice as irrational.

In the first case, we had no problem believing that people could have differing preferences for objects. In the second case, however, once the objects acquired price tags, it seemed stupid to trade something with a higher price for one with a smaller price. The way I presented it, the objects were actually cash in the recent past, and trading any two amounts of cash for each other is clearly irrational because the numerically larger amount can always do more.

I wrote this essay to clear up some confusion regarding the zero-sumness of the stock market. In that case, the object A is a stock certificate while object B is money. The question is basically whether stock has an objective price independent of the buyer. If such a thing existed, then every successful stock sales means either the buyer or the seller has made a pricing mistake.

Conclusion? I don't know. I've distilled it as far as I can.

Haven't written in a while. I have been busy with redoing the ROCSA website, the Career Fair, learning about Fixed-Point Combinators using DrScheme.

In other news, it worries me that learning from people with different viewpoints is so difficult. The specific ones I am thinking about are really violent in their modes of persuasion and invoke all manners of unproven authority at the slightest provocation. They are also quick to issue absolute statements, constantly reasserting whatever authority they choose as the sole source of knowledge, issuing ultamatums at every turn. This is shallow discourse, distasteful shallow arrogant noisemaking. I feel the joys of intellectual discourse being drained from me everytime I talk to brutes like this. How they mistake data for knowledge, and rote memorization for thought!

Yes I do want to talk to people significantly different from myself, but clearly I have overreached the optimal distance here. So just how much variety can I take? I think one thing is for sure, that there must be a shared interest in philosophy. In my book, this amounts to an interest in exploring hierarchies of fundamentality in one's concepts about the world, and more likely than not two people both reaching for the depths would tend to reach the same few places. The hope is that having such places to start from would greatly lessen the conversational burden of being mortally different.

Ah, the strange dreams that keep me going.