Lately I have been taken in by some interesting aspects of Skyrms Studies (more commonly known as evolutionary game theory as applied to philosophical issues). Particularly, I am interested in what sort of progress has been made on the evolution of logic, which was a project suggested by Skyrms in his The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure.

On other fronts, I am working on a paper regarding both "The emergence of simple languages in an experimental coordination game" by Selten and Warglien and "The disadvantage of combinatorial communication" by Lachmann and Bergstrom. What I am hoping to accomplish is to determine whether or not a reasonably simple game can be modelled such that results on deception contrived in the Lachmann and Bergstrom paper can be achieved evolutionarily. As a model for this, I am looking at simulating games based on those in the Selten paper. Nature will choose 2 independent aspects (think shape and color). A sender perceives the combination (a colored shape) and sends 2 independent messages to the receiver (think of a 2-letter string, where the letters have no prior meaning). The receiver then attempts to duplicate the shape and color perceived and both the sender and receiver are paid off in proportion to the correctness of the duplication. In order to get the deceptive signals, it is rather likely that the payoffs might have to be jerry-rigged a bit to create a non-perfectly cooperative game. In general though, whatever results I can obtain should prove interesting.