Talk:Minnesota group meetings

RE: Oct 28, 2010 Minnesota Group Meeting Agenda - Subject: Game Design

One of the items on the agenda for this evening's meetup is "Game Design" as proposed by Prashant. I have visited the Game Design page to look for more information. At the time of this writing, the page depicts a series or subject headings each of which is linked to some other pages on this wiki. I guess there will be some more information added or provided at the meeting today. My purpose in initiating this "talk" is to point out an earlier presentation titled "TAC Energy Concept, Rotterdam, 28 Oct 2009," By Carsten Block et al. This presentation focuses on the game design of a potential TAC Energy competition. The presentation uses four functional building blocks - Game sart; Game Flow, Game End and Game Visualization. There is a later presentation (dated march 5, 2010) which is titled Future Energy Talk EnBW - This presentation, again by carsten Block, focuses on the game design of a potential TAC Energy competition too but with an emphasis on Future Markets - all the way to 2020. The presentation features a roadmap of likely developments in each year going froward. It focuses on e-mobility and other related topics. Just thought these publications might help illuminate some of the issues regarding Game Design proposed for discussion at this evening's meetup.

JEC: Yes, I was in Rotterdam for the first one, and the second is in German and seems to be more or less a vision statement for the future of the German power infrastructure. The problem with the original design as shown in the Rotterdam presentation and in the original white paper, written by Carsten, me, and Wolf, is that the "contracting" process is fairly artificial, and does not happen often enough for an agent to discover patterns or learn anything in the course of a simulation. Prashant has proposed an alternative in which contracting is more or less continuous (new tariffs are accepted 4 times/day), and execution represents a compressed version of continuous time. Prashant has promised to write it up, so I'll wait for him to do that.

Grampajohn 18:23, October 28, 2010 (UTC)