Game theoretic equilibria are mathematical expressions of rationality.
Rational agents are used to model not only humans and their software
representatives, but also organisms, populations, species and genes,
interacting with each other and with the environment. Rational behaviors are
achieved not only through conscious reasoning, but also through spontaneous
stabilization at equilibrium points.
Formal theories of rationality are usually guided by informal intuitions,
which are acquired by observing some concrete economic, biological, or network
processes. Treating such processes as instances of computation, we reconstruct
and refine some basic notions of equilibrium and rationality from the some
basic structures of computation.
It is, of course, well known that equilibria arise as fixed points; the point
is that semantics of computation of fixed points seems to be providing novel
methods, algebraic and coalgebraic, for reasoning about them.Comment: 18 pages; Proceedings of CALCO 200