For what it's worth, I'm very familiar with a game in which offense/defense decisions are paramount, chinese checkers. I'm familiar with it because it's my mother's favorite game which she taught be to play when I was six. Now she's a 100 and she's still very good at it. At each turn a major factor in your choice is between blocking your opponent path or advancing your paths. Brent Meeker On 8/15/2014 4:01 PM, Henry Baker wrote:
Just as we can characterize a computer chess player as aggressive or defensive, I characterize evolution in the same way. There may be no "thought" behind either the computer or evolution, but we humans tend to see things this way, no matter what.
There is some evidence that evolution becomes more aggressive/attacking as the stress on the species becomes more severe -- e.g., famine, etc. Evolution seems to notice that what was working before isn't working now, and starts broadening its search for new niches.
Returning to the original question: In what types of games is an aggressive/attacking strategy optimal, and in what types of games is a defensive strategy optimal?
There is obviously a cost in building up defenses, when some of those same resources could be used to attack. In chess, you need to pay close attention to both in order to win.
What would be very interesting is a game with a "knob" that you could turn that would force the optimal strategy to smoothly changes from defensive to offensive.
I'm just wondering if there's any game theory literature on what types of games might favor the investment in defenses v. the investment in attacks.
At 01:58 PM 8/15/2014, Michael Kleber wrote:
Evolution certainly does "try", in the sense that it tries everything! But I think Henry's question still could make sense: in a game where the players' strategy is "try everything and do whatever works", do offensive or defensive things tend to work more?
In the case of evolution, the best you can hope for in a "defensive" setting is dominating your niche, i.e. expanding to its carrying capacity. In the long term there's no up side; species that diversify and expand their habitat will of course have more ways to grow over time. But at some point they will count as a different species, so I'm not sure *who* counts as winning when that happens.
Well, I suppose you could compete in the defensive niche by expanding your habitat! And actually beavers do exactly this. But in some sense that's actually an offensive strategy; I'm not sure the two categories are well-defined.
As Dawkins has pointed out eloquently, it makes more sense to think of *genes*, rather than species, when thinking about the evolution game. I don't think I know what offense or defense mean there.
--Michael
On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 1:46 PM, W. Edwin Clark <wclark@mail.usf.edu> wrote:
Does evolution "attempt", "try", "sacrifice" or "hope"? That's not my understanding of evolution.
On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Good question, however, I'm focusing on the game of evolution itself, not on the strategies of individuals of the species.
So the real question is whether evolution attempts to protect a particular niche, versus attacking new niches. Many evolutionary biologists would claim that evolution tries to attack new niches with some significant effort, hence the willingness of evolution to sacrifice many failed experiments in genetic mixing in the hope of finding some new successful combinations.
At 12:40 PM 8/15/2014, Dan Asimov wrote:
What about rabbits, pill bugs, turtles, porcupines, squirrels?
--Dan
On Aug 15, 2014, at 6:44 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Some evolutionary biologists have claimed that Darwinian evolution optimizes by using an almost purely offensive strategy.
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