Wisdom Of The Week

"In contrast to mainstream artificial intelligence, I see competition as much more essential than consistency, " he says. Consistency is a chimera, because in a complicated world there is no guarantee  that experience will be consistent. But for agents playing a game against their environment, competition is forever. "Besides," says Holland, "despite all the work in economics and biology, we still haven't extracted what's central in competition." There's a richness there that we've only just began to fathom. Consider the magical fact that competition can produce a very strong incentive for cooperation, as certain players spontaneously forge alliances and symbiotic relationships with each other for mutual support. It happens at every level and in every kind of complex, adaptive system, from biology to economics to politics. "Competition and cooperation may be antithetical, " he says, "but at some very deep level, they are two sides of the same coin"

- Excerpts from Complexity: Emerging Science At The Edge Of Order And Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop.