20041015
New Blog Layout
Slashdot | 'Tit for Tat' Defeated In Prisoner's Dilemma Challenge
"Tit for Tat, the reigning champion of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Competition, has been defeated by a group of cooperating programs from the University of Southampton.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a game with two players and two possible moves: cooperate or defect. If the two players cooperate, they both have small wins. If one player cooperates and the other defects, the cooperator has a big loss and the defector has a big win. If both players defect, they both have small losses. Tit for Tat cooperates in the first round and imitates its opponent's previous move for the rest of the game. Tit for Tat is similar to the Mutual Assured Destruction strategy used by the two nuclear superpowers during the Cold War.
Southampton's programs executed a known series of 5 to 10 moves which allowed them to recognize each other. After recognition, the two Southampton programs became 'master and slave': one program would keep defecting and the other would keep cooperating. If a Southampton program determined that another program was non-Southampton, it would defect."
Update: 10/14 15:08 GMT by J:
If anyone wants to try writing their own PD strategy and see how it fares in a Darwinian contest, I'll host a tournament of Slashdot readers. Here are the docs, sample code, notes on previous runs, and my email address.
20041004
Coffee is Addictive
20040919
emans frustration
I've been struggling to finish my SP for more than a week now. One of the main causes of my problem is my stupidity. Up until last night, one part of my code reads:
open ($fHandle, $fileName);
while (<$fHandle>) {
$printout .= <$fHandle>;
}
close ($fHandle);
This just puts every other line of the file to the $printout variable. I fixed it by doing this:
open ($fHandle, $fileName);
while (<$fHandle>) {
$printout .= $_;
}
close ($fHandle);
Also, i had several problems regarding where the perl interpreter is. In Linux, and most other OSes, it's in /usr/bin/perl, while in Windows, for SiePerl, it's in %Program Files%/SiePerl/perl/%version%/bin/MSWin32-x86-perlio/Perl.exe. So far i haven't solved this yet.
Last night Epoy, Biboy, and Paolo was here. They told me that they haven't seen me for a while. That's mainly because i haven't gone out for a while.
Anyway, i have to finish coding this darn thing.
20040912
Ilocos 2002
Just got a Flickr account.
I'm just testing it.
Here's a picture of me somewhere in Ilocos, getting some fruit. Sorry,
i can't remember the details. This photo was taken April of 2002,
which is more than 2 years ago.
20040911
General Solution for Polynomial Equations
Could this be true?
A post in slashdot said that a Dutch student found a formula
that determines the roots of any polynomial equation. Didn't have time
to read the details... i just posted it to remind myself, and also to
make you my "research team"... hehe... that is, to find out if this is
true.
If this is true, then what the heck does Abel's proof say?
The source of this news is from Fontys school homepage. You could see the babelfish-translated page from altavista.
Also, since it's been /.ed, here's a copy of the pdf from Arxciv.