On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 12:33:31PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 20 Jan 2014, at 10:39, Russell Standish wrote: > > > > >The point about acting randomly is that clearly you are not optimising > >your utility. You a choosing something other than the optimum action, > >so are behaving irrationally by definition. > > Would that not mean that Solovay algorithm to find prime factors is > irrational? > Adding random oracle (and sometimes even just pseudo-random like in > Solovay algorithm) can make a non tractable problem into a tractable > one, with a low price (the result can be false with a low > probability). >
Strictly speaking, rationality applies to agents, not algorithms. But just as stochastic algorithms can provide good enough tractable solutions to NP-hard problems, irrational strategies can provide good enough solutions to NP-hard environmental problems. > > > >Yet, it could be a > >beneficial strategy to do so, for all the reasons raised (fooling your > >opponents, making a timely decision, and so on). > > OK. But that shows that it was rational, after all. I think it is > just means that you might have used a too much contrived notion of > rationality. > It is the definition employed in economics, agent modelling, game theory, cognitive science. It is at least precisely defined, as opposed to the fuzzy notion you and others seem to be defending. It has, without doubt, some considerable problems too, in being unrealistic, and perhaps even paradoxical, as has been highlighted in this discussion, for example. > IMO, the obsession of optimization is what makes life very hard, and > non sensical. It might be part of the materialist delusion. > Eventually it is only a minority of people who optimizes only their > bank accounts, by *all* (dishonest) means. May be the economist > definition of rationality will be useful to define irrationalism ... > Maybe indeed! :) -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
