cl@lgc.com (Cameron Laird) (05/15/91)
In article <735@mixcom.COM> mmvvmm@mixcom.COM (Daniel Offutt) writes: . . . >specifically excludes market mechanisms. If betting were not illegal in >most places, then "idea futures" would need no promoters, "idea futures" >would arise naturally and become very common. On the other hand, I have >never heard of betting on scientific questions, or presidential campaign >promises in Las Vegas. Maybe the basic problem is that the government >increasingly refuses to enforce contracts in this country. Who will buy an >long-term idea future when the government might decide to invalidate them ten >years hence? I'm sure that's a lot of it. > >Getting the market process up and running inside computers is a different >matter. Miller and Drexler have talked and written about doing that, and have >maybe done some experiments. John Holland and some of his students have gotten >into this sort of thing with so-called "classifier systems," though the >emphasis is on machine learning, not economic modeling. And there was some >work done on a kind of design automation or design evolution system by >Lawrence Davis, reported at the 1989 conference on Genetic Algorithms. >That system apparently works well, and though Davis did not explicitly draw >a comparison between its operation and the market process, it seemed to >me that there was such a similarity. I am convinced that we will be seeing >more of this kind of thing in design automation/evolution systems in the >next five years or so, even on ordinary PCs. Others are convinced too, on some level. 1. I've come across at least two recent histories of the *idea* of the market, from a perspective consonant to your. The references are buried now. 2. Computer people now phrase some of their algor- ithms (is there a more general term I should be using?) in terms of "market-based" solutions. 3. It might interest you to look into what I under- stand developmental and neurobiologists call Darwinian models of brain organization. Growing nervous systems are made up of many smaller, more-or-less autonomous units; many or most or all of these units specialize into their final roles through negotiations with their environ- ment, in ways that are reminiscent of market processes. -- Cameron Laird +1 713-579-4613 cl@lgc.com (cl%lgc.com@uunet.uu.net) +1 713-996-8546