Participating in inter-hall contests as a senior didn’t look like it would be engaging, but I was wrong. I discovered how mathematicians think, and made some friends.
A problem statement faced during Takneek’22, which is actually an inter-hall technical contest consisting of several problem statements, in which I was meant to head one of them, along with 2 more Y20s; Aryaman and Saurav. A few juniors were also involved actively.
The problem was of implementing and analyzing Neuro-economic behaviour in a hypothetical complex adaptive system of beings with their behaviour defined and an environment. On the face value, the problem was extremely simple, simulating beings interacting in an environment. Such problems are meant to be simple to implement, which we did in 2 days, but the beauty lay in analysing the system, by perturbing the conditions, modifying constraints, adding/removing complexities. Precisely, we were given a hypothetical creature which we named Macpan, more details here. The major fun part of the problem solving was we induced concepts including religion, capitalism, fascism, communism, tribal warfare etc. on the simple setup, and got results that were not far from what we observe in real-world, including captialism leading to more proliferation than communism over a larger range of parameters, religion maintaining it’s existence, fascism getting dissolved and more.
Overall, it’s easy to relate to idea of simple concepts used hierarchicaly induces unforeseen complexities; this is seen from atoms forming matter to logic gates forming computers!