I need a real world situation involving a rich, but somewhat contained behavior space to attempt a cellular automata model.
In watching the rather lame De La Hoya and Forbes fight last night (gosh, I haven’t seen a blockbuster match in 3-4 years and I watch a lot of boxing!) it occurred to me that boxing might be a very good subject to study.
Why?
- Fixed physical space (boxing ring, arena)
- Rich, but contained environment (ring, corners, arena, crowd, cities)
- A huge amount of historical data (we can watch and record 100s of recent fights and study individual boxers)
- Rewards and Punishments are severe and are both immediate and historical (large payouts, punches to the face, crowd chants… both in current bout and previous bout)
- Possible use of local rules showcasing emergent bout behavior (avoid punch or punch at X moment drawn out over time reveals overall bout outcome, boxer movement, energy depletion…)
- Readers would find the subject interesting outside of academics (boxing!)
- I can remove some of the variables and likely not lose a lot of the value of the research (I might be able to ignore culture/social status/marital problems/etc. and still build a reliable model of a boxing bout and hopefully draw some connections between behavior and cellular automata modeling)
So who cares? or what does any of this have to do with anything?
Behaviorism has a robust theoretical framework but lacks a mathematical framework. Â Up to now most of the mathematical explanations in behaviorism involves pretty standard multivariate statistics and statistics experimental design. (here’s a typical approach in schedule analysis) Researchers more and more use game theory models to generalize certain relationships. Â However there is no robust mathematics of behavior (nothing even close to what we see in economics and physics) and there is no generalized computer modeling (that I can find… and I’m looking for modeling like we do with markets, the weather, and cosmology – all highly complex dynamic systems)
Some links to explore if interested in existing mathematical “laws and models.
Cellular Automata might provide a framework. Â
Studying boxing might be a fun and interesting way to explore the capabilities to of automata to model human behavior. Â What’s particularly interesting about boxing as a study of operant behavior is the number of obvious reinforcement schedules at play and the easy to spot emitted behavior. Â
Boxing is equally interesting as a subject for automata because of the fixed space, dynamic physical motion and finite duration (i.e. we might actually be able to model in a reasonable time). Â Lastly, in both cases we should be able to verify our findings against a lot of real data, both historical and in upcoming bouts.
More to come, certainly!
~R
