Culture, its evolution and anything inbetween
Over at ICCI are a couple of blog posts by Olivier Morin about project I’m involved in, the Color Game. The first post provides an introduction to the app and how it will contribute to research on language and communication. And, as I mentioned on Twitter, the second blog post highlights one of the Color … Continue reading “The Color Game: Challenges for App projects”
I’ve collected five New Savanna posts on Alan Liu into a single PDF; you can download it from my SSRN page, Remarks on Alan Liu and the Digital Humanities, A Working Paper. Abstract and introduction below. * * * * * Abstract: Alan Liu has been organizing and conceptualizing digital humanities (DH) for two decades. … Continue reading “The Only Game in Town: Remarks on Alan Liu and Digital Humanities”
This is a guest post by Hedvig Skirgård. The Great Language Game, have you heard of it? It’s an online game where players compete in matching audio clips to the correct language. The game was created by Lars Yencken earlier this year and has become very popular. Data generated by the game can be used … Continue reading “The great language game: Confusing languages”
I’ve just found a new online game called the museum of parallel art (thanks to my friend Robin). The info on the trailer reads as follows: Visiting the virtual Museum of Parallel Art is a very special experience you’ll share with someone. You’ll express your thoughts and feelings towards art with cards, or try to … Continue reading “Language Games with the Museum of Parallel Art”
Takeshi Konno, Junya Morita and Takashi Hashimoto talk about the integrative approach to the emergence of symbolic communication. The talk included details of a hybrid model of cognition for communication that involved a context-free grammar to handle denotation and a neural network to handle connotation. However, the most interesting work was an analysis of the … Continue reading “Evolang coverage: Brain activity during the emergence of a grounded communication game”
I’ve just finished reading The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. Yes, I’m a little behind the times for a geek. Anyway, I was struck by the concept of Azad in the book. The protagonist visits an Imperial civilisation whose whole society revolves around the playing of a board game called Azad. Except this … Continue reading “Language as a board game”
The Categorisation Game or Naming Game looks at how agents in a population converge on a shared system for referring to continuous stimuli (Steels, 2005; Nowak & Krakauer, 1999). Agents play games with each other, one referring to an object with a word and the other trying to guess what object the first agent was … Continue reading “Mutual Exclusivity in the Naming Game”
Game Theory was fist applied to evolution by John Maynard-Smith and George Price in 1973. It differs from traditional game theory is that it focusses on dynamics of strategy change more than the properties of strategy equilibria, although equilibria still exist within EGT but are know as Evolutionary Stable Strategies as opposed to Nash Equilibria. … Continue reading “Mathematical Modelling 101 – Evolutionary Game Theory”
This post is going to just be a very brief introduction to what Game Theory is, how it works and some basic terminology. In later posts I will get more advanced and cover how it can be applied to Cultural Evolution. What is Game Theory? Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics most commonly … Continue reading “Mathematical Modelling 101 – Intro to Game Theory”
The 7th International Conference “Ways to Protolanguage” (http://www.protolang7.org/) is going to take place at the University of Düsseldorf and online from Sept 6 to Sept 8, 2021. The thematic focus of Protolang is on delineating the socio-cultural, semiotic, symbolic, ecological, genetic, anatomical and neuro-cognitive requirements for evolving (proto)language. Sign use, tools, cooperative breeding, pointing, vocalisation, intersubjectivity, bodily … Continue reading “Call for Papers: Protolang 7”
