Abstract
AbstractPrevious computer simulations of the Minority Game (MG) have shown that the average agent number in the winning group (i.e., the minority group) had a maximal value such that the global gain was also maximal when an optimal amount of information was available to all agents . This property was further examined and its connection to financial markets has also been discussed . Here we report the results of an unprecedented real MG played by university staff members who clicked one of two identical buttons (A and B) on a computer screen while clocking in or out of work. We recorded the number of people who clicked button A for 1288 games, beginning on April 21, 2008 and ending on October 31, 2010, and calculated the variance among the people who clicked A as a function of time. We find that variance per person decreases to a minimum and rises to a value close to 1/4 which is the expected value when agents click buttons randomly. Our results are consistent with previous simulation results for the theoretical MG and suggest that our agents had employed more information for their strategies as their experience playing the game grew. We also carried out another experiment in which we forced 101 fish to enter one of the two symmetric chambers (A and B). We repeated the fish experiment 500 times and found that the variance of the number of fish that entered chamber A also decreased to a minimum and then increased to a saturated value, suggesting that fish have memory and can employ more strategies when facing the same situation again and again .
Highlights
The Minority Game (MG) is a simple evolutionary game designed for studying, among other things, how the actions of selfish players can be coordinated by an invisible hand to cooperate for global benefit
Human players of a real MG do not have a fixed memory and most likely will not use binary tables for strategies as in a theoretical MG model, and understanding of which essential features of the theoretical MG model would remain in a real game could have practical applications
Beginning in April 2008, with the help of the Office of Personnel and the Computer and Information Network Center of National Chung Hsing University (NCHU), we set up a time clock system for university staff to play the MG while clocking in and out of work
Summary
The Minority Game (MG) is a simple evolutionary game designed for studying, among other things, how the actions of selfish players can be coordinated by an invisible hand to cooperate for global benefit. In the first phase, consisting of the first 458 games, the winning buttons of the previous four games were provided on the screen for reference. In the second phase, consisting of the final 880 games, the winning buttons of previous four games were still provided but these results had been modified without the knowledge of the players in favor of button B by adding a value 0.09N to n(A)[16 ].
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