Animals “lie” to their own kind to get what they want (1995)
rochester.edu
rochester.edu
I've seen a small yippy dog go into a frenzy trying to attack a much larger dog, and when it slipped its leash, it DID attack the larger dog, and was promptly tossed in the air.
To say it another way, even if the shrimp were automata with nothing remotely like what we'd call consciousness or intention, it could still make sense to talk about "bluffing" in a game-theoretic sense.
What's important is that it occurs with something approaching an equilibrium frequency. If all weak shrimp always bluffed, strong shrimp would start to always fight, and the weak shrimp would be wiped out. But if they only bluff sometimes, the probability of losing a fight may still be high enough to prevent this from happening. The baseline frequencies of strong and weak shrimp in the population also matter here -- weak shrimp could afford to bluff more in a strong-shrimp-rich population, assuming physical characteristics couldn't reliably identify them as weak.
I'm not sure you understood my point at all.
What if the shrimp genuinely thinks he can take the big guy, because he's just so angry he gets stupid? That's not a bluff, that's a suicidal threat.
"Bluff" has a very specific definition, and it requires that the person bluffing knows they cannot successfully follow through on the bluff.
And from reading this, I'm not sure the researchers accounted for that distinction.
From a game-theoretic perspective, this is incorrect (even though it accurately describes everyday use of the word).
Think about a poker bot which bluffs. It makes no sense to talk about "knowing" here. The GTO strategy to poker is just a solution to a gigantic series of equations.
My point was that talking about "thinking" and "knowing" is missing the deeper point. You can talk about bluffing without those concepts.
my pup pretends to pee on the pee pad to get cheese, but YMMV
Jared: I feel very sad.
Dinesh: Fucking Gilfoyle.