Re: Bag of Tricks: Choosing actions via the matching law

baylor wrote:

> Falk Hueffner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Probably that means I'm not intelligent, but I would cast stonestorm
> > 100% of the time.
>
> Doesn't mean your not intelligent, just not human ;-)
>
> The above stuff (law? theory? pseudocode?) is from the matching law
> which is an empirical phenomena that psychologists have noticed. No
> one knows why people (and other aninals) act this way, they just seem
> to
>
> There's also been a bunch of studies where people say what their
> strategies are and then they are monitored and it turns out what most
> people think they'd do is wrong. My theory - unlike in computers,
> where memory is readable and writable, human brains are write-only
> memory. Data is stored in a format where you can't just get the data
> back out again. So we have all these test and introspection and
> guessing methods where we try to articulate what we feel, believe,
> would do, etc. and it doesn't always match
>
> Now, it's entirely possible i screwed up when trying to apply this to
> games. Maybe it works differently in this context. The one example of
> humans the text gave was basketball players and how they decide
> whether to shoot 2-pt or 3-pt shots. People don't always shoot 2 point
> shots or always shoot 3 point shots. They mix it up. You'd think they
> mix it up for all sorts of complex reasons like range to defenders,
> that sort of thing, but empircally over a large enough sample size
> (whatever that is), it follows the matching law. Freaked a lot of
> people out when they published that
>
> On a completely different note, here's a funny story my animal
> learning teacher told us. He told us that rats are smarter than
> undergrads. Put them both in an environment with two buttons. One
> button randomly gives a reward (food pellet or nickel) 30% of the
> time, the other 5% of the time. They then tested each to see what
> would happen
>
> The rat, having a very small brain, experimented but once it got the
> hang of it decided to only push button A. The undergrads, however,
> decided in their heads that the reward was not random, it was based on
> a pattern and so they kept switching from key to key in various
> patterns they "learned". In the end, the rat got rewarded 30% of the
> time and the undergrads got closer to 10%
>
> i don't know much about it, but my guess is that it has to do with
> n-gram length and brain size. An n-gram is a series of n items that go
> together, In IR theory, "united states of america" is a 4-word term
> that should be treated as one word (gestalt). Outside of text
> processing and search engines, you still have the concept of a
> sequence of actions or things that can signal something. Maybe a rat's
> little brain only stores sequences of one move. In that case, pressing
> button A gives the best results. Maybe humans can look for more
> complex patterns, say 5-7 actions in length, so they stare at the two
> buttons and come up with patterns like "ABBBAB". The downside is, they
> overcomplicate it and miss the shorter patterns that work best. In
> essence, our intelligence and ability to handle complexity (for AI
> folk, we create a larger "state space") actually screws us up. Note
> that "AAAAA" might have gotten better results but because of time
> limitations and the size of the state space, they might never have
> investigated that
>
> Don't know if that helps, but at least i think it's interesting :)
>
> -baylor



The term  'To smart for your own good'    ...


Also SunTzu or Clauswitz  recommend causing your enemy to overthink your
strategy


I wonder how many of the 'undergrads' were science or engineers who may
have
absorbed the ideas about statistics and the scientific approach....

Were the student told that the buttons were independant of each other.
Buttons that human use
usually are interconnected functionally, and may be what most people would
expect,
versus the rats who dont type usenet messages using a keyboard (no
previous expectation..)