The Proficiologist

The Rivalry Domain

Previously, I’ve been talk­ing in broad terms about very gen­eral con­cepts in profi­ci­ol­ogy. This will be the first time I nar­row my focus into a spe­cific domain. A domain is a restricted set­ting with only a small num­ber of rel­e­vant events / senses / agents – basi­cally a toy prob­lem, or a sim­pli­fied model envi­ron­ment. The hope is that we can use impor­tant ideas from these domains as fun­da­men­tal build­ing blocks that will help us ana­lyze more com­plex setups. In other words, we should be able to build more inter­est­ing / real­is­tic gener­ics by mix­ing & match­ing sim­ple com­po­nents from mul­ti­ple domains, as if we were build­ing a com­plex mol­e­cule atom-by-atom.

In this post we will talk about the Rivalry domain, which focuses on events where one generic ben­e­fits at another generic’s loss. I will sup­ple­ment my expla­na­tion with for­mal nota­tion loosely based on func­tional pro­gram­ming lan­guages. I am not requir­ing (or expect­ing) read­ers to have a back­ground in com­puter sci­ence – it’s just that this kind of nota­tion is very use­ful for describ­ing non­triv­ial generic behav­iors through the com­po­si­tion of sim­pler con­structs. In any case, I will be explain­ing this func­tional nota­tion as I go.