Andrew Waterman gave a talk on how they use game theory to understand ecological problems used in a small university in Mexico.

In the last 30-40 years cattle ranching has become the main form of agriculture from traditional agriculture. The location is now at risk of becoming a desert. Although the desertification is a slow process, it is obviously something they want to avoid and need to focus efforts on.

First comes deforestation and then a resulting erosion. The erosion can lead to desertification.

Their interest is to understand how the social ecological systems interact with each other. The people influence the land and the land influences the people. One of the questions is about selfishness and cooperation behaviours and how they affect the outcome.

To do this, they first created a rules based game inspired by a game called Pente. They created a rules that have 2 ways of making points. A selfish way, or a cooperative way.

This is used to try and understand the psychology behind cooperative play and selfish play and to help understand what the effects of policies in the real world might have what outcome.

They bring the findings to the workers to educate what the effects of their behaviours can be over time. They also listen to the workers feedback to integrate the results back into the game.

They then developed a role playing game (RPG) that expands the concepts further. They played with workers, academics and government players and gathered the feedback from each.

This is an application of COMMOD (some framework to help gather information for analysis), which does an analysis of the situation, develops a model, create a RPG and the create computer simulations.

The talk then went into the details of the architecture of how this was implemented, the architecture and the API.

This was an extremely interesting talk that showed how rules can be used for research purposes.