Scientific Community Game (SCG)

Applications: Have a fun game for recruiting good technical employees, online teaching and learning technical information, and innovation in technical areas.

Other potential applications: Improve peoples health?

Brief Description

The SCG is about scholars making claims that are defined by a constructive, interactive opposition protocol. Claims are proposed and opposed. The reputation of a scholar depends on the fraction of not sucessfully opposed claims it proposed. This creates competition because scholars want to have a high reputation. But it also creates collaboration because of the constructive nature of the opposition protocol. Reputation winning scholars have to give out hints about their "secrets".

An important design consideration in SCG is how to prevent scholars from making trivial claims that cannot be successfully opposed. There are two ways to deal with this: 1. Create a predefined set of claims, called NonTrivialClaims, from which the scholars must choose the claims they want to propose. 2. Introduce the notion of strengthening a claim as an alternative way to oppose a claim. Strengthening involves proposing a new claim stronger than the previous one but that cannot be refuted.

The game can be played with scholar = human or scholar = software agent implemented by human.

Questions

Questions for David: How to design a controlled experiment? How to get players playing it? Facebook? Game design consideration: visualizing reputation gain?

Basic claim structure

Two players Alice and Bob. Multiple players play a round-robin or Swiss-style tournament.

Alice claims: She can win RPpos(FS, JS, pred) FS is a set of artifacts given by a FS language. JS is a set of artifacts defined for F in FS. Given by JS language. pred is a predicate: pred(FS,JS).

Whatever F in FS Bob gives her, she can find a J in JS(F) making pred true. Only FS and JS and pred are known.

Refutation protocol RPpos(FS, JS, pred): Bob provides artifact F in set FS Alice processes F producing artifact J in set JS(F) Alice wins iff pred(F,J)

Alice claims: She can provide an F in FS to Bob so that he cannot find a J making pred true. Only FS and JS and pred are known.

Refutation protocol RPneg(FS,JS,pred): Alice provides artifact F in set FS Bob processes F producing artifact J in set JS(F) Bob wins iff pred(F,J)

The artifact might be an algorithm or some structure, like a Boolean formula. The processing might be complex, like analyzing an algorithm to be done by a human or simple, like finding an assignment for a Boolean formula.

Claims are chosen from a fixed catalog or they are defined intensionally by giving conditions that FS must satisfy.

Scholars are motivated to propose not successfully refutable claims.

Scholars must recognize claims they can defend (for proposing). Scholars must recognize claims they can refute (for opposing). The reputation of a scholar = fraction of unopposed claims that have been attempted to be opposed at least once divided by the total number of proposed claims. The scholar with the highest reputation wins. This creates a virtual world of scholars. Collaboration: Losing reputation means gaining knowledge.

Alice loses reputation when her claim is refuted by Bob but Bob has to give a detailed reason (artifact F that he cannot process as planned). Alice loses energy when she tries to refute a claim by Bob, but she does not succeed. Bob gave her a harder artifact F than she thought would exist: this creates a learning experience for Alice. We need to make sure that the scholars are discouraged to propose trivial claims.

 
============== variant
Bob provides artifact F in set FS and a secret J' in JS(F)
Alice processes F producing artifact J in set JS(F)
Alice wins iff (pred(F,J,FS,JS(F)) and consistent(F,J'))

Interesting claims:
If I get a free XYZ health club membership, I can lower my weight by 5% in 1 month.