go-firstmove

Analysis script for "Strategic social learning and the population dynamics of human behavior: the game of Go", by Bret Beheim, Calvin Thigpen, and Richard McElreath, in Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 35, Issue 5, pp.351-357 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.04.001

Requirements

• R (4.1.2 or greater) https://cran.r-project.org/
• rethinking package (v1.59 or greater), http://xcelab.net/rm/software/
• kaya package, https://github.com/babeheim/kaya
• cmdstan package
• posterior package
• tictoc package (for timing analysis steps)
• RColorBrewer package (for figures)
• LaTeX, https://www.latex-project.org/

Instructions:

In R, set the working directory to that containing this readme file. For example, on a Mac or Linux machine, you might type into the command prompt

  setwd('~/Desktop/go-firstmove')

if the folder containing the project is named 'go-firstmove' and on your Desktop. You can tell if you are in the right place by typing in dir() and seeing this readme.txt file.

The raw_data/ folder contains two files from which all calculations are derived:

• gogod_database.csv - game information for the professional Go games used in this analysis, drawn from the Games of Go on Disk (GoGoD) database, 2009 edition. This database is commercially available for a small fee.

• players.csv - a list biographical details of the professional Go players in our database, compiled from Sensei's Library in 2010-2011.

The analysis itself is broken up into independent modules that pass outputs to each other. The whole process runs by typing one command into R,

  source('./run_project.R')

with the project folder as the working directory. If all goes well, each step of the analysis will execute in sequence, and write the final tables and figures into the figures/ folder, along with a runtime log.

If one has access to the original GoGoD database of Smart Go Format (SGF) files, the 1_prep_games.R script will draw from those to produce the raw_data/gogod_database.csv. Specifically, the code will look for a ZIP file called GoGoD CD 2009.zip in the raw_data/ folder.

The total time until completion will vary by machine but should take several hours.

The project is maintained by Bret Beheim (beheim@gmail.com) and is hosted at https://github.com/babeheim/go-firstmove.