Re: poly: ESS for HPLD

A very nice posting, Carl. It really sparked this list.

I have been doing somewhat similar simulations on my own, thinking
about the growth and evolution of technospheres. I have written a few
precursors to a real simulation of the situation (my latest is in Java
and can be found at http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/Java/CivTest.html, but
it is not very useful yet). What I have seen is the emergence of
wedges differentiated from each other, representing clades of related
civilizations. The borders tend to become rather sharp, which suggests
that conflicts and competition will be significant at least along
these borders. It may be that such "dangerous" regions will be the
ones that need to accelerate their development the most, making their
descendants spread faster than the calmer parts of the border where
similarities and hence cooperation is easier.

I have also taken a preliminary look at what happens if memes
(represented as "cultural state vectors") can diffuse between settled
systems. The result looks like a gradual homogenization of the
interior, but the divergence of the frontier creates significant
gradients (this depends a lot on parameter settings). It may also be
affected by the rate of memetic change in the interior (I have
modelled this as a random walk in a R^n space representing
memes). Overall, this may be a very interesting thing to look into.

Given the interesting ideas that have come up so far in this
discussion it seems like I should work a bit more on incorporating
various oasis distributions in my program, and try to create an usable
interface. The analytical work is important, that is a good basis to
compare the simulations with.

carl feynman <carlf@atg.com> writes:

> This is, as I said, a stupid strategy. A better strategy would be to grow
> the industrial base exponentially, and send out an exponentially increasing
> wave of seedships, to multiple destinations. But I haven't done the ESS
> analysis for this case yet. It seems to devolve into a twisty maze of
> strategies and counter-strategies.

Sounds like worth modelling with a genetic algorithm.

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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