Long time ago I wrote about a social learning tournament organized as a part of Cultaptation project by Kevin Laland and Luke Rendell. The tournament was a contest of  strategies for behaving in an uncertain and changing environment in which one learn either via innovating or via imitating actions of others. For more details see the home page of the tournament and the supplement to the article in Science, links below.

Me and my colleagues, Ozan Aksoy, Vincent Buskens, and Rense Corten, participated in that tournament. The results of the tournament are known already since March 2009.  Our strategy is called “rummer”, which stands for a large drinking glass in Dutch, but especially because it was inspired by Random Utility Models (RUM). Rummer scored 9th overall, which is a quite good result given the total of 104 contestants.

Today’s issue of Science magazine features two articles about that tournament:

• Conquering by Copying by Elizabeth Pennisi
• Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament by Rendell et al. together with an extensive supplement.

I’ll comment on these later.