[FRIAM] What's in a name? MOTH to a Flame

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

I think the proper name is Conditional Association Strategy (as opposed to a Condition Altruism Strategy.  

 

My original impulse was not .. um … prosocial.  I was pissed by the extent to which the entire literature had gone down the Axelrod rat hole with its totally unnatural assumptions and annoyed at my colleagues for giving things cute names.  So, I thought, I can play this stupid game, too.  And,  indeed, I could.  And SURPRISE! it’s still a stupid game, even though I can play it.  

 

Nick 

 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Sunday, November 1, 2020 11:00 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] What's in a name? MOTH to a Flame

 

Nick,

 

On a recent FRIAM you expressed mild regret on your naming of MOTH (My Way or the Highway)
  http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/9/2/4.html

 

Given a chance to rename it what were some of the options over the years?  Does the list have better suggestions?

 

Naming may seem trivial and arbitrary but it is important as this CS aphorism attests <https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html> .
      "There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors."

 

For the list, MOTH is a winning strategy in an expanded Iterated Prisoners Dilemma game where agents can leave a relationship during a round in the tournament and be randomly assigned another unassociated agent. They always cooperate and then leave if defected against. MOTH agents unconditionally cooperate and conditionally associate.

 

An example of an expanded TIT-FOR-TAT strategy in this game might be to conditionally cooperate and unconditionally associate. ie cooperate until defected against then switch to always defect and  stay in the association. (think of a bad marriage without divorce). 

 

We continue to think MOTH remains an important simple heuristic for link formation/maintenance in trust networks / decentralized systems. And naming is important.

 

-Stephen

 

 

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