646 research outputs found
Winning and losing in the hall of mirrors
This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Who are we? Why do we do the things we do? These questions are constantly under scrutiny, forever unable to provide us with adequate answers, it seems. Yet, with
the continuing rise in popularity of digital media, we are able to situate these questions in a different sphere and see aspects of the self that we were unable to perceive before. Digital media forms have provided us with the capacity to explore whole new worlds, as well as allowing for new and innovative methods of communication. These changes make a huge impact on the daily lives of individuals. This thesis presents a theoretical contribution to both psychoanalytic thinking and to the rapidly expanding field of games studies, with especial reference to avatar-based games. It considers the status of the bond formed between the individual at play (known here as the ‘user’) and the game itself. Furthermore, it presents this as a model
which identifies the user’s relation to the game dynamic through an understanding of
the key components of a video game, including aspects such as the control mechanism. Elements which cross the boundary between the user/game realities are also
considered with relation to hyperreality, thus forming a more complete imagining of
this framework. This also allows for an application of this dynamic to what we define as violent (and associated) acts within games. In turn, this allows for a more complete understanding of the game situation, and can be applied to our understanding of the user as well. This thesis provides a standalone framework which can also be utilised in other types of investigation in future
Reputation
We explain what reputation effects are, how they arise and the
factors that limit or strengthen them
Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation
This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion
Fast swap regret minimization and applications to approximate correlated equilibria
We give a simple and computationally efficient algorithm that, for any
constant , obtains -swap regret within only rounds; this is an exponential improvement compared to the
super-linear number of rounds required by the state-of-the-art algorithm, and
resolves the main open problem of [Blum and Mansour 2007]. Our algorithm has an
exponential dependence on , but we prove a new, matching lower
bound.
Our algorithm for swap regret implies faster convergence to
-Correlated Equilibrium (-CE) in several regimes: For
normal form two-player games with actions, it implies the first uncoupled
dynamics that converges to the set of -CE in polylogarithmic
rounds; a -bit communication protocol for -CE
in two-player games (resolving an open problem mentioned by
[Babichenko-Rubinstein'2017, Goos-Rubinstein'2018, Ganor-CS'2018]); and an
-query algorithm for -CE (resolving an open problem
of [Babichenko'2020] and obtaining the first separation between
-CE and -Nash equilibrium in the query complexity
model).
For extensive-form games, our algorithm implies a PTAS for
, a solution concept
often conjectured to be computationally intractable (e.g. [Stengel-Forges'08,
Fujii'23])
Communication games, sequential equilibrium, and mediators
We consider -resilient sequential equilibria, strategy profiles where no
player in a coalition of at most players believes that it can increase its
utility by deviating, regardless of its local state. We prove that all
-resilient sequential equilibria that can be implemented with a trusted
mediator can also be implemented without the mediator in a synchronous system
of players if . In asynchronous systems, where there is no global
notion of time and messages may take arbitrarily long to get to their
recipient, we prove that a -resilient sequential equilibrium with a mediator
can be implemented without the mediator if . These results match the
lower bounds given by Abraham, Dolev, and Halpern (2008) and Geffner and
Halpern (2023) for implementing a Nash equilibrium without a mediator (which
are easily seen to apply to implementing a sequential equilibrium) and improve
the results of Gerardi, who showed that, in the case that , a sequential
equilibrium can be implemented in synchronous systems if
Studying strategies and types of players:Experiments, logics and cognitive models
How do people reason about their opponent in turn-taking games? Often, people do not make the decisions that game theory would prescribe. We present a logic that can play a key role in understanding how people make their decisions, by delineating all plausible reasoning strategies in a systematic manner. This in turn makes it possible to construct a corresponding set of computational models in a cognitive architecture. These models can be run and fitted to the participants’ data in terms of decisions, response times, and answers to questions. We validate these claims on the basis of an earlier game-theoretic experiment about the turn-taking game “Marble Drop with Surprising Opponent”, in which the opponent often starts with a seemingly irrational move. We explore two ways of segregating the participants into reasonable “player types”. The first way is based on latent class analysis, which divides the players into three classes according to their first decisions in the game: Random players, Learners, and Expected players, who make decisions consistent with forward induction. The second way is based on participants’ answers to a question about their opponent, classified according to levels of theory of mind: zero-order, first-order and second-order. It turns out that increasing levels of decisions and theory of mind both correspond to increasing success as measured by monetary awards and increasing decision times. Next, we use the logical language to express different kinds of strategies that people apply when reasoning about their opponent and making decisions in turn-taking games, as well as the ‘reasoning types’ reflected in their behavior. Then, we translate the logical formulas into computational cognitive models in the PRIMs architecture. Finally, we run two of the resulting models, corresponding to the strategy of only being interested in one’s own payoff and to the myopic strategy, in which one can only look ahead to a limited number of nodes. It turns out that the participant data fit to the own-payoff strategy, not the myopic one. The article closes the circle from experiments via logic and cognitive modelling back to predictions about new experiments
Spartan Daily, October 16, 1981
Volume 77, Issue 32https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6808/thumbnail.jp
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