He set this thing up 3 weeks ago and I wasn't "ready." He's been wondering what The Poufu's the Deal.
I proceed that way alot. Got to wait until the "right time." Things, at least important things must mesh — timing and fitting and feeling.
• If it's like a diary then why let others read my private mullings? Friends and family know of my fences and boundaries, and most don't seem to give a whooot.
I've figured this space is either fertile or it is not. What springs up might relate to the metaphorical 'weather and soil' as to deciding why the sun do shine.
Within such profundities, I present an amazing piece transcribed from a BBC World Service science program:
GENEROUS TIT FOR TAT
BBC Science Magazine
May, 1992
Dee Palmer [hereinafter P] - Narrator [British: "Presenter"]: If a vampire bat returns from a night's foraging with an empty stomach, its neighbour will give it some of the blood that it drank during the night. Such altruism, which is quite common in the animal kingdom, at first sight contradicts the idea of survival of the fittest. However, because the favour is likely to be returned the following night, this kind of altruistic behaviour in the end benefits all. But how could such reciprocal altruism arise in the first place and become established in populations? One explanation is the idea of 'tit for tat' that was proposed some time ago and that's now been developed by Martin Nowak at the University of Oxford into what he calls 'Generous Tit for Tat'. It all started with a game called 'The Prisoner's Dilemma'.
Nowak [hereinafter N:]: This prisoner's dilemma is quite a simple game, but it's very difficult to understand its full implications. You only have two players in this game and the two players have only two options. And the first option is to cooperate and the second option is to defect. By cooperation I mean that the players would perform the altruistic behaviour, for example they would do something to help each other, and by defect I would mean that they do not perform this altruistic behaviour, they would exploit each other.
P: The dilemma is that if YOU decide to cooperate and your partner doesn't - he defects - then you lose everything and your partner gets all the points. But if you take the gamble and your partner agrees to cooperate, then you share the points.
N: So if both players cooperate, we can say that both would receive 3 points as a reward for cooperation. And let us assume if both would defect, then each player only gets one point .
But if one player defects and the other player cooperates, we give 5 points to the player who has defected and zero points to the player who had cooperated. And you realise immediately that if there's only one round of interaction, then the rational strategy would be to defect, because if I assume you're going to cooperate in the game, then it's better for me to defect, because I would get 5 points rather than 3 points. And if I assume that you're going to defect, it's still better for me to defect, because I would get 1 point rather than zero points. So if rational human players could play the prisoner's dilemma, they would defect.
P: So even though the players get fewer points for defecting than for cooperating, they still defect because that way they at least get something. Martin Nowak has a real life example.
N: If you would think that two companies would share a market, then to cooperate would be not to invest money in advertisement, and to defect would be to waste money more or less on advertisement. And if one company would not make an advertisement, then it's better for this one company. So you see immediately that if both companies would agree not to spend money on advertisement, that would be a kind of cooperation that would save money and they would have a higher gain. But now if one company starts to defect and would make a large advertisement campaign, it would probably win the market and the other company has lost, so that would be defection against cooperation. And if the companies cannot agree to cooperate, they would both defect, they would both compete for the market by advertisement and therefore waste money in a way.
P: That in essence is the simple version of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Strange things start happening though when you play more than one round of the game.
N: This game became interesting when Axelrod invited mathematicians, biologists and game theorists to participate in a computer tournament. And he invited them to submit strategies that were computer programmes and these computer programmes would then play against each other in a round robin tournament. And in this first tournament he received 14 entries from many different countries and they were playing against each other, and the big surprise was that the simplest of all strategies that have been submitted, won. And this strategy was submitted by Anatole Rappaport, who is a famous game theoretician, and this strategy is called tit for tat. Tit for tat means that I do whatever you did to me in the last round. So if in the last round you cooperated, then I will cooperate in the next round. If you have defected, then I will defect in the next round.
P: In other words, when there's more than one round, tit for tat is a very powerful strategy because now there's a penalty for defecting.
N: Tit for tat is a very nice [Br: polite] strategy. It would never start to defect first. But it's a non-forgiving strategy, it will always hit back if someone else started to defect. And that has led us to the question of how would tit for tat perform in a more biological context? If you think about this computer tournament, then you're looking at strategies that cannot make errors at all. So they would stick to their programme and they would always perform the same behaviour. But in biological situations we would expect errors to occur. And by these errors I mean that for example it was my intention to display cooperation, but my cooperation is misinterpreted by the opponent. I have failed to cooperate even though I intended to cooperate.
The simple version of a tit for tat with errors is that I have a very high probability to cooperate if you have cooperated, and I have a very high probability to defect if you have defected, but I have always a certain probability to make errors. And if now these erroneous tit for tat players would play against each other, after some time they will make an error, and then they will start to defect, and this defection is now never put back into cooperation unless a second error occurs, which is quite an unlikely event. Therefore tit for tat loses quite a lot of its power in real biological situations that are doomed by errors.
P: So in the real world tit for tat would break down - if the real world was simple. However when Dr. Nowak fed a complicated world into his computer, he found that tit for tat was even more powerful.
N: If we have such a population without tit for tat, then evolution always proceeds toward complete defection, which means that cooperation will never establish in a population in the absence of tit for tat. But if there's only a very tiny amount of tit for tat playing individuals in this population, then the dynamics is changed completely, you observe the following thing that a tiny amount of tit for tat players can act as a catlyser in order to overthrow the defectors and to initialise the evolution of cooperation.
P: Just a little tit for tat then could have a snowball effect, punishing defection and rewarding cooperation.
N: What we have observed is that tit for tat acts as a catlyser for the evolution of cooperation, but once cooperation gets going in the population, tit for tat again is overthrown by strategies which are more forgiving. And in this way these more forgiving strategies can compensate for the errors they're going to make. And we have called this strategy "Generous Tit for Tat". And this strategy can be defined in the following way: I always try to cooperate, if you have cooperated in the last round; but I sometimes forgive if you have defected in the last round. And for the parameters I mentioned initially, the probability of defection must be one third. So the implication is that you should never forget a good move, but you should sometimes fogive a bad move.
P: Martin Nowak at the University of Oxford's Department of Zoology with his Generous Tit for Tat.