Blog 20-11

The task for last week’s class was designing a game that would include an evolutionary process, including the key elements of Darwin’s theory: variation, selection and reproduction.

The game my group (#3) and I designed, starts by dividing the class in a few groups, say over 5, and one person is the omniscient narrator, like a bank.

Each group is a firm, producing a product with 3 characteristics that have 3 types of variation:

1.       Size: small, medium or large;

2.       Color: red, blue or yellow;

3.       Shape: square, triangle or circle.

In advance, the so called bank will assign values to all variations of the characteristics. Assume that profit = quantity, so price = 1 unit of money. For example:

1.       Size: small (30), medium (10) or large (20);

2.       Color: red (10), blue (20) or yellow (30);

3.       Shape: square (20), triangle (30) or circle (10).

This results in an optimal product preference, in the example above the consumer preference will be a yellow, small triangle.

The game will run in rounds, every round a firm has to state what kind of product it will produce, using the 3 characteristics. On a big screen in class, the choices of product of every firm will be shown, so all the firms know after the round what each firm has produced and earned according to the consumer preference.

In that case, firms will try to find out what the main consumer preference is, according to information about the production of other firms. That is the main goal of the game: a firm has won when it has produced a product that makes it gain/produce 90 units.

An important part in the game is that a firm needs to survive too, by setting a minimum of earnings/production of 50 units. In the example above, a firm producing a medium, red circle for example, will go bankrupt because it will only earn/produce 40 units. The same holds for a firm producing a medium, red square (40 units). But a firm producing small, blue circle for example, will live because it will earn/produce 60 units.

When the first round is finished, the firms can see on the screen whether they still live and what the other firms tried to produce to survive or even win the game. In that way, the firms can compare their choices of characteristics and adjust to each other. In the next round the firms will state their choice of characteristics again, in a different setting than before if they did not gain or produce 90 units.

In this way, variation is part of the game because changing the setting of characteristics every round.

Selection is integrated because of the information about the production of other firms will influence the behavior of firms to copy others. Therefore an optimal set of characteristics is selected every round by the surviving firms.

Reproduction is present because of the copying of other’s sets of characteristics.