If you believe Matt Ridley, it’s Ricardian comparative advantage. His is one of many answers to the Edge question of What’s your formula? your equation? your algorithm?. Other interesting answers from Tooby, Kurzweil, Haidt, and many others.
Oct 15 2007
From this year's citation While direct mechanisms are not intended as descriptions of real-world institutions, their mathematical structure makes them amenable to analysis. Finding the best of all direct mechanisms for a given problem is often straightforward, and once the best direct mechanism has been found, the res...
Oct 14 2007
Many of my favorite economists - including Arnold and Tyler - recoil from "villains-and-victims" stories. After a recent lunch, similarly, Robin Hanson panned the movie Blood Diamond in large part because of it is a villains-and-victims story. It's a safe bet that these economists are also jaded about stories with h...
Oct 14 2007
If you believe Matt Ridley, it's Ricardian comparative advantage. His is one of many answers to the Edge question of What's your formula? your equation? your algorithm?. Other interesting answers from Tooby, Kurzweil, Haidt, and many others.
READER COMMENTS
Matt
Oct 14 2007 at 12:23pm
Is this related to Mankiw’s post on the ultimatum game, and under what conditions a non-zero sharing of reward takes place?
The worlds oldest algorithm is the herding uncertainty constant.
The probability of a mammal being X distance from the center of the herd must be less than the uncertainty constant. p(x)
Matt
Oct 14 2007 at 12:26pm
p(x} is strictly less than K, K fixed for each mamalian species. x is the distance from the herd center, p is probability.
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dearieme
Oct 14 2007 at 12:48pm
I’m an admirer of Ridley’s writing. Lets overlook the fact that he’s Chirman of Northern Rock, shall we?
Matt
Oct 14 2007 at 1:20pm
Now I am stuck trying to clarify.
Reptiles have a poor sense of the herd, so they are truly malthusian with exponential decay and expansion of population.
Mammals have the ability to predict the center of the herd by local interactions, it is the emotional learning in the limbic system that evolution invented.
Every mamalian species has a model of the variation and center of the herd which offers the most comfort, the uncertainty constant for a mammal is the herd mean over the herd sigma. When the herd spreads to thin, members break off or engage in herd fights or other means to get back into the comfort zone.
mammals run a predictive filter, measuring their local interactions with herd members to adjust their position and determine the herd center. This brings us back to the uimatum game.
In the ultimatum game, mammals will measure the relative value of a transaction over time and accept unfair exchanges that are within the price*transaction uncertainty band. Essentially the mammal is adjusting his price position-transaction within the local herd. He wants the spread between the next wealthiest and next poorest to be within transaction range, and his relative position within a price range.
General Specific
Oct 14 2007 at 3:29pm
I’d say the oldest is E=MC**2.
It’s all about energy. Or power. Even comparative advantage can’t even begin without energy to get the ball rolling. Comparative advantage is about maximizing and conserving energy. But without energy, and its materialization in matter, there’s nothing to conserve.
Nada.
E=MC**2. Definitely the oldest algorithm.
Troy Camplin
Oct 14 2007 at 8:07pm
In the latest science an article shows that when chimps play the ultimatum game, they act more like what economists predicted people would act like. TUrns out we’re more fair-minded and less economics-thinking than chimps. At least when it comes to the ultimatum game.
The oldest algorhythm, btw, is the ritualistic dance that allos for someone (typically of the opposite sex) to enter your territory. Gobie sand blennies are good to watch to see this. They are, incidentally, lobe-fined fishes (thus related to those fish who were the ancestors of land animals — turns out territoriality, meaning property rights protection and recognition, is evolutionarily extremely deep, going all the way back to fish).
Colby Cosh
Oct 19 2007 at 11:06pm
Google returns one hit for “herding uncertainty constant”: this page. Could it be a good candidate for world’s newest algorithm?
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