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Stockpiling Antibiotics and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/story?id=98179&page=1 Antibiotic resistance is a serious health concern, now and for the future. This article, by John Allen Paulos, discusses the phenomenon of stockpiling antibiotics, something he argues is due to anxiety about the future. When people fear not being able to access antibiotics (perhaps because others have been stockpiling it), they begin to stockpile […]

Game Theory Behind Current Political Discourse

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-country-has-lost-its-mind-its-time-for-some-game-theory/2018/06/12/f8863076-6e77-11e8-bd50-b80389a4e569_story.html Something that became clear over the past few years is how politically divided the country has become. People have begun taking actions and saying things that they wouldn’t have just a few years ago. The article highlights this with an example where a city council member verbally harassed a 14 year old girl who […]

Schelling’s Point and The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

https://www-nature-com.proxy.library.cornell.edu/articles/184844a0.pdf https://www.seti.org/seti-institute/project/details/seti-observations https://sites.psu.edu/astrowright/2017/07/09/schelling-points-in-seti/ As  mentioned in Chapter 6, a coordination game is one in which the goal of both players is to coordinate on the same strategy. However, if there exists more than one Nash equilibria, then both players could fail to coordinate on choosing the same one. To help narrow down the choosing of […]

The Game of Plant Life

Plant growth with respect to their environments/ or better put plant ecology, is not only a testament of the complexity of nature but also a physical representation of the logic games played throughout a plant’s life— referred to in class as game theory. The paper begins by defining what the competition is over— in any […]

Preventing Disease Outbreak with Game Theory

The spread of disease has been an international issue ever since the start of globalization. People unintentionally bring disease with them as they travel to their destination. The result of the spread of disease could be deadly, as seem by the Ebola virus in Africa. A recent article linked the game theory to potentially preventing […]

Actions In Game of Thrones As Understood By Graph Theory

Graph theory is constantly being applied to Game of Thrones in order to better understand the complex and ever-changing social network between the backstabbing characters.  Throughout the series, houses flip between being allies and enemies solely based off a whim.  However, we can better understand the reasoning between these houses moves if we break their […]

Game theory can help prevent disease outbreaks

https://theconversation.com/game-theory-can-help-prevent-disease-outbreaks-102934 In the article “Game theory can help prevent disease outbreaks”, authors Nicos Georgiou and Istvan Zoltan Kiss describe how we can use game theory to prevent various worldwide diseases. They point out that the actions an individual wants to take to prevent disease may not be beneficial for the whole group. Game theory, however, […]

How Hospitals Exhibit Ego Networks

Humans are evidently not the only things that have social networks. In this study, we can see how even healthcare facilities have an ego network. The paper touches on many topics discussed, such as triadic closure and structural balance theory. It describes a strong tie as two hospitals sharing more than fifty patients and a […]

Poker and Game Theory

Game theory optimal essentially focuses on the ability to craft an unexploitable strategy to ensure long term profitability in an unbelievably complex game such as No Limit Texas Hold’em. Another important concept that most poker players employ while deciding whether to call an opponent’s bet is the mathematical idea of Pot Odds. A simple way […]

The Tragedy of the Commons is Not a Nash Equilibrium

Hardin’s tragedy of the commons is a popular metaphor that is commonly described as a Nash equilibrium. In a public resource (such as the titular grazing commons) used by many entities (herders, for example), the resource will be depleted entirely by the self-serving entities, and while each entity is acting to maximize personal gain (at […]

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