Harré Michael S
Complex Systems Research Group, Faculty of Engineering and IT, The University of Sydney, Sydney 2006, Australia.
Entropy (Basel). 2018 Jan 4;20(1):27. doi: 10.3390/e20010027.
Iterated games are an important framework of economic theory and application, at least since the original work of Axelrod's computational tournaments of the early 80's. Recent theoretical results have shown that games (the economic context) and game theory (the decision-making process) are both formally equivalent to computational logic gates. Here these results are extended to behavioural data obtained from an experiment in which rhesus monkeys sequentially played thousands of the "matching pennies" game, an empirical example similar to Axelrod's tournaments in which algorithms played against one another. The results show that the monkeys exhibit a rich variety of behaviours, both between and within subjects when playing opponents of varying complexity. Despite earlier suggestions, there is no clear evidence that the win-stay, lose-switch strategy is used, however there is evidence of non-linear strategy-based interactions between the predictors of future choices. It is also shown that there is consistent evidence across protocols and across individuals that the monkeys extract non-markovian information, i.e., information from more than just the most recent state of the game. This work shows that the use of information theory in game theory can test important hypotheses that would otherwise be more difficult to extract using traditional statistical methods.
至少从20世纪80年代初阿克塞尔罗德的计算竞赛的开创性工作以来，重复博弈一直是经济理论与应用的一个重要框架。最近的理论结果表明，博弈（经济背景）和博弈论（决策过程）在形式上都等同于计算逻辑门。在此，这些结果被扩展到从一项实验中获得的行为数据，在该实验中，恒河猴依次进行了数千次“猜硬币”游戏，这是一个类似于阿克塞尔罗德竞赛的实证例子，在竞赛中算法相互对抗。结果表明，当与不同复杂度的对手博弈时，猴子在个体之间以及个体内部都表现出丰富多样的行为。尽管早期有相关推测，但没有明确证据表明猴子使用了“赢则继续，输则改变”策略，不过有证据表明未来选择的预测因素之间存在基于策略的非线性相互作用。研究还表明，在不同的实验方案和不同个体之间都有一致的证据表明，猴子提取了非马尔可夫信息，即不仅仅是来自博弈最近状态的信息。这项工作表明，在博弈论中使用信息论可以检验一些重要假设，否则使用传统统计方法将更难提取这些假设。
