When Innovation Matters: An Analysis of Innovation in a Social Learning Game.

This paper examines the value of innovation within a culture by looking at “innovate” moves in the Cultaptation Project’s social learning game (Boyd et al. 2008). We produce a mathematical model of a simplified version of this game, and produce analytic methods for determining optimal innovation behavior in this game. In particular, we provide a formula for determining when one should stop innovating and start exploiting one’s accumulated knowledge. We create an agent for playing the social learning game based on these results, and in our experiments, the agent exhibited near-optimal behavior.

[1]  K. Laland.  Social learning strategies , 2004, Learning & behavior.

[2]  K. Schlag.  Why Imitate, and If So, How?, : A Boundedly Rational Approach to Multi-armed Bandits , 1998 .

[3]  Daniel Nettle,et al.  Language: Costs and benefits of a specialised system for social information transmission , 2005 .

[4]  R. Sibly,et al.  Producers and scroungers: A general model and its application to captive flocks of house sparrows , 1981, Animal Behaviour.

[5]  J. Henrich,et al.  The evolution of cultural evolution , 2003 .

[6]  Alan R. Rogers,et al.  Does Biology Constrain Culture , 1988 .

[7]  Ulrich Mueller,et al.  Optimal Retaliation for Optimal Cooperation , 1987 .

[8]  W. Hamilton,et al.  The Evolution of Cooperation , 1984 .

[9]  Dana S. Nau,et al.  Accident or intention: that is the question (in the Noisy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma) , 2006, AAMAS '06.

[10]  BENNETT G. GALEF Jr,et al.  Why behaviour patterns that animals learn socially are locally adaptive , 1995, Animal Behaviour.

[11]  Magnus Enquist,et al.  Social Learning : A Solution to Rogers ’ s Paradox of Nonadaptive Culture , 2007 .

[12]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems , 2006, AAMAS 2006.

[13]  J. M. Smith,et al.  The Logic of Animal Conflict , 1973, Nature.

[14]  Kevin N. Laland,et al.  Social Information Transmission and Human Biology , 2006 .

[15]  HighWire Press.  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London , 1781, The London Medical Journal.

[16]  T. Valone,et al.  Potential disadvantages of using socially acquired information. , 2002, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[17]  Peter J. Richerson,et al.  Why does culture increase human adaptability , 1995 .