Just another i3ci weblog
The group has a git repo located at git://imaginarynumber.net/altruism that will contain all of our work going forward. (Though at the moment there’s only our ugly toy altruism simulation we hacked up to make sure we understood the basics.)
Check out the code by running git clone git://imaginarynumber.net/altruism on the command line or using your git client of choice.
Different modes of altruism is a rich area for exploration, both in research into the current literature and in simulation. The three that are most apparent are sharing (individual divides a resource it has with other), helping (individual helps other to gain a resource), and altruistic punishment, the most counter-intuitive. Altruistic punishment is the sacrifice of an individual’s energy to defeat others that do not contribute/cooperate/behave altruistically; an individual may sacrifice itself to kill off “selfish” individuals and prevent their reproduction.
The most important consideration in simulation is how to accurately/meaningfully model these modes of altruism, considering such things as costs of donation or punishment and the expression of multiple types (do sharer-helpers also punish, or do punisher-sharers not help, etc.)
Some literature on altruistic punishment, since it was the least familiar to me: evolution of altruistic punishment, altruistic punishment & origin of cooperation, altruistic punishment in humans
–Evan Shelhamer
