Plato, Machiavelli and machiavellism

Opponent Modeling in Machiavelli

Opponent modeling is a technique in computer game-playing which attempts to create a model of an opponent’s strategy. This model can then be used to predict the opponent’s future actions. This paper attempts to apply opponent modeling to the commercial card game Machiavelli, a game containing imperfect information. Neural networks are used to build the models. These neural networks are trained ...

Plato and Innatism

Machiavelli and the liberalism of fear

This article revisits the long-standing question of the relations between ethics and politics in Machiavelli's work, assessing its relevance to the 'liberalism of fear' in particular in the work of Judith Shklar, Bernard Williams and also John Dunn. The article considers ways in which Machiavelli has been a 'negative' resource for liberalism - for instance, as a presumed proponent of tyranny; b...

Plato and Innatism

Plato and Divination

Plato uses the idea of divinatory knowledge as a metaphorical descriptor for a variety of kinds of daytime, waking knowing. What unites these examples is that they all include discussion of a kind of knowing that cannot account for itself, and that is tentative, imagistic and non-discursive. These metaphorical uses can further be illuminated by his more detailed discussion of divinatory knowled...