Frith, C., 2007, Making up the Mind, Blackwell, Oxford
- Author : Frith, C.
- Year : 2007
- Title English : Making up the Mind
- Publisher : Blackwell
- Publisher's Location : Oxford
- ISBN : 978-1-4051-6022-3
- Pages : 234
- Edition : paperback
- Comments : pp. 116 - 119 In 1956 the science of making machines do clever things was named ‘Artificial Intelligence. In this, as in any research programme, the easy problems were the first to be addressed. Perception seemed easy, since almost anyone can read handwriting and recognise faces, it should be easy to build machines that can read handwriting and recognise faces. Playing chess, on the other hand, is very difficult. Very few people can play chess at the level of a Grand Master. Building machines which can play chess would be left for later. Fifty years have passed and a chess computer has beaten the world champion. It is perception that turns out to be the hard problem. ... The development of information theory was very important. ... But there was a fundamental problem in the original formulation. The amount of information in a message or, more generally, in any stimulus was entirely defined by that stimulus. ... The problem with the scheme provided by information theory is that it takes no account of the viewer. ... But we know that all viewers are different. They have different past experiences and different expectations. These differences affect how we perceive things. Consider the black square in figure 5.4. For some viewers this is not just a black square. It is the Black Square exhibited by Kasimr Malevich in 1913, the first example of the visionary, non-objective art of the Russian suprematists. p.191 Ernst Fehr has studied more complex economic games – called Common Good Games – in which many people play together. If everyone cooperates by putting their own money into the system, then everyone gains. But there are always people who behave unfairly. These are free riders, players who realise that they can benefit from the fair behaviour of other people without needing to donate any of their own money. Once free riders appear in the group, people gradually stop cooperating. Even the most generous player doesn’t see why she should go on supporting someone who is putting nothing into the system. As a result, the group finishes up with less money than they could have gained from full cooperation. This is where altruistic punishment comes in. Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter allowed players to punish the free riders. This was altruistic punishment since it cost $1 to punish another player, but that other player lost $3. When punishment of free riders is possible, then cooperation in the group steadily increases and everyone gains.