Go and Visit: https://www.patreon.com/c/HazyCausation

Go and Visit: https://www.patreon.com/c/HazyCausation

The problem I’m trying to solve is whether there are biases in the responses of the LLMs that are not explicit in their responses but can only be seen when they are asked to iterate on complex tasks.
An interesting task im trying to test biases with is choosing policy decisions for a country.
Changes to national and international policies can have surprising counterintuitive results, and it would be unreasonable to model this with any accuracy, so instead I use an NKC tuneable fitness landscape to model the complex interactions between countries and policy decisions.
Quick summary of the process:
I’m interested to see if an LLM pretending to be a country has biases that could only be winkled out using these co-evolving iterative strategies.
Here is a quick pick of four differently complex fitness landscapes from the NKC System:

And here is a picture of the 16 random countries optimising their fitness in a co-evolutionary setting

Once the first weak Nash equilibrium is achieved, I pause the system and randomise 3 policies, and set it running again. This would be the point that i would let the LLMs take control fully but at the moment I can only run it for a few steps on my laptop.
The NK model, developed by Stuart Kauffman, is a useful framework for studying how complex biological, social, or technological systems evolve over time. The key idea is that each of the “N” components in a system adds its fitness contribution to the total, but each of these components’ fitnesses is dependent on the qualities of “K” other elements in the same system
Here is a nice article to describe this model: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/217461/1/s41469-018-0039-0.pdf
Stuart Kaufman’s original system is based around a random numbers siting on a hypercube. – which is a challenge to visualise, so historically, the surfaces have been “representations” rather than actual plots, such as this figure from Felipe A. Csaszar

I always found this a little frustrating, so here is my attempt to visualise an actual surface extracted form an NK landscape.
Algorithm:


Fluid Drag System

Body parts now have a fluid drag system that calculates how water resists an object’s movement by analysing its shape, velocity, and surface orientation.
Using Monte Carlo sampling, points across the object’s surface and determine how the water slows it down. This creates (semi) realistic water resistance
The buoyancy system calculates how much of an object is submerged in water using Monte Carlo modelling and applies an upward force to counteract gravity. This allows creatures and their body parts to float naturally in simulated water.

The system asses submersion by randomly sampling points across the object’s volume and checking how many fall below the water’s surface. If the object is partially submerged, the system estimates the submerged volume and applies the appropriate buoyant force at the centre of buoyancy.
Lets see if anything comes of it. …

First signs of directed life