The e ects of irrationality on scienti c agents in the simulation of scienti c discovery
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2022-02-18
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
The Rich et al. paper of scienti c intractability [1] concludes that the solu-
tion to scienti c inference is intractable given the current set of assumptions.
This renders solutions to the problem of scienti c automation unsolvable in
polynomial time.
In an e ort to further explore the idea of scienti c automation derived from
the notions of Rich et al. we attempt to use agent-based modelling to sim-
ulate the e ects of irrational decision making on scienti c agents. In doing
so we explore the e ects that irrationality has on agent's performance when
solving scienti c problems.
Agents representing scientists must ascertain the structures of a series of
Finite State Transducers representing some cognitive system in reality that
the scientists wish to understand. These scienti c agents build up their own
FST, their own theory of how the cognitive system works, incrementally
as to try and match the structure of the cognitive system. By assigning
these agents some level of irrationality which makes agents's FST building
increasingly random as it increases we test by means of various metrics how
the agents's performance changes for various levels of irrationality.
Ultimately, the ndings from this paper indicate that adding irrationality
to the agents's behaviour provides no added bene t to the e ectiveness of
the agents. An agent that chooses optimally every time will generally out-
perform an agent that makes sub-optimal moves for any metric this paper
tests for. The agents perform better or on chance level for low irrationality
and on or below chance level as irrationality increases. In the end, these
ndings remain in line with the Rich et al. paper of scienti c intractability
when it comes to the di culty of automating scienti c solutions.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen