Insects and Entropy • Hacker News Board

Re: Insects and Entropy

#21

Post by ivain » Thu, Aug 21, 2014, 11:53 AM UTC

icegreentea wrote: post #18

replicant wrote: post #17

I have a similar story to tell. As an undergrad in a course of robotics, we had to program a wheeled robot and all the robots would be place in an environment with obstacles. The robot should avoid crashing with the obstacles and the other robots. Extra points if the robots moved smoothly. Me and my friend implemented a very simple algorithm. All the sensors measured distances to objects, and to every reading we woul…

Weird so many people went for FSMs. You would have thought that a simple literature search would have brought up all sorts useful nuggets. Given the scenario you describe - no goal other than avoid collisions, the scheme you implemented is basically a simplified potential field approach. All that being said, I can appreciate the core of this story. I spent my final year implementing, testing, and optimizing D -Lite f…

You need spaces after each asterisk.

Re: Insects and Entropy

#22

Post by thisjepisje » Thu, Aug 21, 2014, 12:52 PM UTC

akjetma wrote: post #4

That dumb kid's name? Albert Einstein.

Or Bill Gates. Or Steve Jobs perhaps.

Re: Insects and Entropy

#23

Post by eru » Thu, Aug 21, 2014, 1:58 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #12

eru wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, but Tit-for-Tat didn't win because the other programs crashed.

Very true. It won because it tapped into a simple but persuasive idea about interpersonal dynamics -- only be benevolent if your opponent is benevolent. It succeeded with this simple strategy against much more complex schemes.

Oh, just the opposite: tit-for-tat starts out benevolent and only retaliates when the opponent `cheats'. And tit-for-that is also quick to forgive.

Grim tit-for-tat, that keep punishing after the first transgression, and a tit-for-tat variant that starts out malevolent in the very first move (but then copies the opponent) did markedly worse than straight up tit-for-tat.

Re: Insects and Entropy

#24

Post by wnewman » Thu, Aug 21, 2014, 3:35 PM UTC

I do not deny the importance of the KISS moral of this story. However, there is also an important meta-moral from putting this story in a larger context: what lessons about feasible complexity you draw from your insect-themed programming contests may depend strongly on whether people like the dunkosmiloomump team happen to be participating.

(See https://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/cgi-bin/contest/resu... .)

(The winning entry was elegant, complicated, and effective. I was Busman Holiday Club in that contest. I was reasonably pleased with my moderately complicated moderately effective entry, but even allowing for small team and shorter lightning-division timescale, the performance of my design falls rather short of theirs, and the junkyard rat design aesthetic of my entry falls rather short of the ballerina-by-day-ninja-by-night polish of that team's work.)

Re: Insects and Entropy

#25

Post by zallarak » Thu, Aug 21, 2014, 6:21 PM UTC

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

- An excerpt from "Stranger" by Albert Camus

Re: Insects and Entropy

#26

Post by mherrmann » Thu, Aug 21, 2014, 8:07 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #11

mherrmann wrote: post #5

What does this have to do with entropy?

The insects that crashed, or contained logic errors, or that cornered themselves, had high entropy. The "dumb kid's" insect had low entropy. Think about it.

Yeah I understand how it was meant. But it's completely useless to use a mathematical/physical term with a very well defined meaning which does not apply in that context. It would have been better to use "complexity" instead. I feel "entropy" was only used for link bait reasons.