Evolving players of economic games

Last week we brainstormed an idea for the actual initial game we were going to use and ended up trying to go with the market game. Fred found some really interesting articles on agent implementation in social systems and we started to think about how to implement agents/learning AI’s for the GP to compete against. In class, we decided that the learning AI’s might be too difficult to program and that we should figure out an alternative so we could focus our efforts on the GP itself — maybe still with the market game with random or pre-determined strategies, or maybe in a new game altogether at least for learning clojure.

We got my laptop all set up with the needed software–everything except for lein (which I didn’t need this week as I was just focusing on learning the language).

I’ve read a couple chapters of the pdf of Programming Clojure and I’ve read through/watched a few of the tutorials that Lee emailed me. I have yet to really try writing code on my own, but I’m confident I will be able to do that this week.

I spent a lot of this week figuring out how github does version control and getting it to play nice with netbeans/lein. I have github itself working but I’m still not entirely sure that leinigen is happy — I guess we’ll see. Then I forked clojush and looked at the code for awhile. Finally, with the goal of just writing the simplest program that works, I took odd.clj and recreated it from scratch, which was helpful in understanding how push works and how to work push through clojure. I still don’t entirely get it though, and I wasn’t able to meet with the group as often as I’d like — I definitely have to work on that next week.

So far it’s been a slow start. I downloaded a slew of programs and plugins and such, and I think that I’ve gotten them all installed correctly on windows 7, which was an experience in itself. I still need to figure out how exactly everything is used for and how to use it.

Since I was gone all this weekend I haven’t been able to spend as much time on this, but I still started in on reading through the links Lee emailed me last week. I have yet to start writing code, but I plan on getting going with that this weekend.

The problem I ran into when researching potential games was the tendency for most games to either be more oriented toward the simple game-theory aspects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_in_game_theory) or focused on virtual representations of real markets (http://www.google.com/search?q=market+simulator).

The couple I did find seem to fit in a third category, in that they are full fledged computer games that have many aspects and variables without depending on real markets–pretty much what we’re looking for. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_II, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporate_Machine, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_The_Market, http://www.topshareware.com/Wall-Street-Raider-download-1499.htm, http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Game-student-CD-ROM/dp/0072513802/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top) If you read the descriptions, you will see that each of these has distinguishing features, so we do have a degree of choice depending on what kind of program we want to make.

I could not find any APIs for any of these games, but I was unsure about what exactly to search for.

So I just read the grant proposal. It looks like we’re definitely going to be using PUSH — the proposal is pretty centered around it. What we’re attempting is one half of the software engineering side of the proposal, the other half being general productivity applications (for address books etc). It also doesn’t seem like the proposal is that centered around the actual economic algorithms being useful in economics. It’s more that large, complex economic games are a good fitness test for robust intelligence (because they’re difficult to solve arithmetically) and allow nicely for multiple elements interacting with each other.

One of the project’s large goals is human competitiveness wherever possible.  Near the end of the proposal is also a three-year timeline for the project, which includes the generation of the fitness tests as well as the creation and application of the programs.