Thursday, August 16, 2018

Santa Fe Institute Spring 2018 Complexity Challenge

At the end of my Schroedinger fellowship I decided to treat myself with participating in the Santa Fe Institute Spring 2018 Complexity Challenge. I've been a fan of the SFI as long as I've known what it does, and I've seen the most impressive papers published by authors affiliated with SFI.



The challenge itself was an agent-based model with rewards, i.e., it was closely connected to partially-observable Markov decision processes and game theory. In my solution, (which earned me an honorable mention) I took neither approach but just played around a bit with strategies I chose ad hoc. Despite this, I was amazed by the rich diversity of behavior I observed. It took me some 40 work hours but it was totally worth the effort. Thanks heaps to the organizers of the challenge, and congrats to the winners -- I hope I get the chance to participate again at some later time!