41–50 of 69 posts
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine
Short clip: https://youtu.be/beuseJ0Wm3M
Detailed demo: https://youtu.be/gkNaZJmii28
Having futzed with bartering in diablo (and non-fiat trading denominated in items of stable value), I quickly came to appreciate fiat currency. Being able to combine two “half trades” into an equivalent barter exchange is vastly easier.
At one point I was able to trade some of the forum gold I accumulated from diablo 2 for a “perfect IV foreign Ditto” for shiny pokemon breeding.
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Yes, the resulting tensor is incredibly sparse, but still too large to ever be practical for use as anything but the theoretical upper limit on the complexity of a model. The issue is that while you can remove pretty much all possible interactions for a specific case you have no idea where an interaction could pop up unexpectedly with a huge impact ahead of time. For the medieval theme the leader of the village may b…
how many people do you talk to in a day?
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how many people do you talk to in a day?
This is a perfect example of the limitations of old school social graphs. The number of people you talk to is just the first order effect. What about all the people that people in your company talked to? That has a non zero economic impact on you. Similarly for any other company that your company talks to, and so on and so on.
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Neat, now I'm curious. Can you explain why?
Agent-based models capture the messy reality of economic systems by simulating heterogeneous actors making local decisions with imperfect information, allowing for emergent phenomena, non-linear dynamics, and adaptation over time, precisely the features that equilibrium models abstract away through unrealistic assumptions of perfect rationality, homogeneity, and static optimization that fail to predict or explain cri…
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This is a perfect example of the limitations of old school social graphs. The number of people you talk to is just the first order effect. What about all the people that people in your company talked to? That has a non zero economic impact on you. Similarly for any other company that your company talks to, and so on and so on.
that still scales linearly with number of people, not quadratically.
Just as in the real world we don't spend most time fighting between each other or some monsters, it would be nice to have a MMO that focuses mostly on economic activities. By that I mean producing goods services and trading.
It's only fun to make money on say world of warcraft because most people aren't also doing that. (but instead buy your goods and use them for something essentially unproductive in economy-terms) Even then it can feel pretty stupid given the amount of arbitrage bots people have set up, you have to focus on very niche opportunities or oversights by those arbitrage bots. Kinda like the real economy
Just as in the real world we don't spend most time fighting between each other or some monsters, it would be nice to have a MMO that focuses mostly on economic activities. By that I mean producing goods services and trading.
Just as we have weather forecasting, climate models .. we do need and should have good fine-grain computational models of complex systems such as the cell .. and the global economy. We should be able to have whole economy simulations give reasonable predictions in response to natural events and lever-pulling such as : - higher progressive tax rates - central bank interest rate moves - local tariffs and sanctions - sh…
While your last point is certainly an ideal to aspire to, something tells me that the powers that be would not actually want to get rid of booms and busts, because ultimately that is where a lot of the “wealth” for those high up is created. You don’t really need complex models to solve the problem of some humans being really, really greedy, driving markets to overheat, ending in catastrophic failure.
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Neural network based computer vision models also existed for decades. They weren't very good and weren't really used, till early 2010s when people figured out how to make them work. Now they are vastly superior to all the other ways. This is quite common across the sciences. Some technique doesn't seem to work because of missing crucial insights or technology. Then somebody fills the gaps, and the technique works. Th…
"The models might become viable at some point" is very different from the original claim at the top level of this comment chain, though, which made a positive assertion that agent-based models are better. The parent comment to yours was right to call out that claim, and it offered a reasonable basis for that counterargument at the same time.
We can write a very accurate quantum mechanical model for the oxygen atom. But you can't actually simulate it without a galaxy sized classical computer. But it is very realistic=accurate model.
Or you can write and easily simulate a non-realistic semiclassical model. This one is a realistic=efficiently simulatable model.
Obviously a fully agent made model is more realistic in the "accurate" sense, because it correctly models the underlying reality. But if you make realistic agents, you have something inefficient (non realistic in the "simulatable" sense).