"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

She abandoned that train of thought, and read on to the end of the piece. тАЬNo agency operates in a
vacuum,тАЭ it said. That was one way to put it! The NSF had been buffeted, grown, stagnated,
adaptedтАФdone the best it could. Throughout all, its basic purposes and methods had held fast: to
support basic research; to award grants rather than purchase contracts; to decide things by peer-review
rather than bureaucratic fiat; to hire skilled scientists for permanent staff; to hire temporary staff from the
expert cutting edges in every field.

Anna believed in all these, and she believed they had done demonstrable good. Fifty thousand proposals
a year, eighty thousand people peer-reviewing them, ten thousand new proposals funded, twenty
thousand grants continuing to be supported. All functioning to expand scientific knowledge, and the
influence of science in human affairs.

She sat back in her chair, thinking it over. All that basic research, all that good work; and yetтАФthinking
over the state of the worldтАФsomehow it had not been enough. Possibly they would have to consider
doing something more.
 PRIMATES IN the driverтАЩs seat. It looked like they should all be dead. Multicar accidents, bloody
incidents of road rage. Cars should have been ramming one another in huge demolition derbies, a global
auto-da-f├й.

But they were primates, they were social creatures. The brain had ballooned to its current size precisely
to enable it to make the calculations necessary to get along in groups. These were the parts of the brain
engaged when people drove in crowded traffic. Thus along with all the jockeying and frustration came the
almost subliminal satisfactions of winning a competition, or the grudging solidarities of cooperating to
mutual advantage. Let that poor idiot merge before his on-ramp lane disappeared; it would pay off in the
overall speed of traffic. Thus the little primate buzz.

When things went well. But so often what one saw were people playing badly. It was like a giant game
of prisonersтАЩ dilemma, the classic game in which two prisoners are separated and asked to tell tales on
the other one, with release offered to them if they do. The standard computer model scoring system had
it that if the prisoners cooperate with each other by staying silent, they each get three points; if both
defect against the other, they each get one point; and if one defects and the other doesnтАЩt, the defector
gets five points and the sap gets zero points. Using this scoring system to play the game time after time,
there is a first iteration which says, it is best always to defect. ThatтАЩs the strategy that will gain the most
points over the long haul, the computer simulations saidтАФif you are only playing strangers once, and
never seeing them again. And of course traffic looked as if it were that situation.

But the shadow of the future made all the difference. Day in and day out you drove into the same traffic
jam, with the same basic population of players. If you therefore played the game as if playing with the
same opponent every time, which in a sense you were, with you learning them and them learning you,
then more elaborate strategies would gain more points than always defect. The first version of the more
successful strategy was called tit for tat, in which you did to your opponent what they last did to you. This
out-competed always defect, which in a way was a rather encouraging finding. But tit for tat was not the
perfect strategy, because it could spiral in either direction, good or bad, and the bad was an endless feud.
Thus further trials had found successful variously revised versions of tit for tat, like generous tit for tat, in
which you gave opponents one defection before turning on them, or always generous, which in certain
limited conditions worked well. Or, the most powerful strategy Frank knew of, an irregularly generous tit
for tat, where you forgave defecting opponents once before turning on them, but only about a third of the
time, and unpredictably, so you were not regularly taken advantage of by one of the less cooperative
strategies, but could still pull out of a death spiral of tit-for-tat feuding if one should arise. Various
versions of these firm but fair irregular strategies appeared to be best if you were dealing with the same