Running learning tournaments on the NGS - a new user case study

There is a new case study now available from the NGS website on the use of NGS resources to run an international learning tournament.

Luke Rendell wanted to find out more about how organisms, including humans learn.  It is known that many organisms can learn for themselves and also acquire information from others (social learning) but we have little idea of what kind of strategies for combining these two information sources we expect natural selection to favour.  To try and answer this, Luke ran a computer-based tournament on the NGS.  All-comers were invited to compete for a 10,000 Euro prize by devising a strategy to guide how agents learn and prosper in a simulated evolutionary environment.

Luke coded the simulation model in MATLAB and then ported it to the open-source Octave software which was made available on a number of NGS clusters. The tournament attracted over 100 entries, so running it meant they had to run over 100,000 individual simulations. This took just over 60,000 CPU hours to complete.  Luke had very few options available as 60,000 computer hours would have been a deal breaker if he had been restricted to in-house computing resources. 

One advantage of using the NGS was that they could run many simulations in parallel but the principal advantage was more basic than that – doing it on the NGS meant it could be done at all.

Luke explained “We are incredibly grateful to the NGS for the helpful and flexible way that resources were made available to us. Without it, our research would simply not have happened. We are looking forward to working with the NGS again to run follow-up tournaments”.

To read more about the learning tournament see the "Using the NGS to run a computer tournament on social learning strategies" case study.