The Game Theory of Life
Christos Papadimitriou, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley, along with some collaborators, recently made an interesting connection between game theory and biological evolution. It was found that an established algorithm in game theory, the multiplicative weights update algorithm, could effectively describe genetic variations over generations. The algorithm uses information from past experiences (or past games […]
Bigger roads does cause traffic to get worse
Commuters in metropolitan areas know what it feels like to be in daily bumper to bumper traffic. The author of this article writes about how he remembers growing up in Los Angeles and dreamt up ways of improving the condition by adding more lanes to enable more people to pass. This common idea that many […]
Game Theory behind Amazon’s reason to not sell iPhones
The craze about the iPhone 6 has already rapidly taken over the nation like an epidemic. When Apple announced the iPhone 6 only a few days ago, as it did in the last seven generations of iPhones, customers have “flocked to every carrier website to get a guarantee of receiving the device.” Besides buying the […]
The Importance of Networks in Stopping Disease
Epidemiologists study the patterns, causes, and effects of health and disease conditions in defined populations. Often times, the public relies on them to contain outbreaks and provide medical advice. One of the most efficient ways of containing an outbreak is a method called contact tracing. Contact tracing works by finding everyone who had close contact […]
Hawk-dove evolutionary game theory and Australian Gouldian finches
Evolutionary game theory, specifically the hawk-dove theory, is popular in the field of theoretical biology, and has been discussed on this blog several times before, but has never been actually observed in the wild–until now. The main difficulty comes from identifying which animals are actually the “hawks” and the “doves,” which isn’t too clear-cut in […]
Should You Use Facebook?
Facebook, the ultimate social network, has been known for its ability to allow people to connect with others. The term, “friend”, has been stretched to include acquaintances and colleagues. As a result, one’s network expands much more easily and rapidly—with people being the nodes, and edges being the friend relations. Although it has broadened our […]
Game Theory in Your Life
Game Theory, the study of strategic decision making, can be applied to many practical uses even without the heavy use of mathematics. Ben Durinio outlines 7 ways Games Theory can be used to find the optimal strategy in a regular consumer’s life. In class we have learned how to compute the Nash equilibrium, best strategy, […]
Inappropriate Friend Suggestions on Facebook
For those students and faculty that use Facebook, it is often a convenience when there are friend suggestions on the right-hand side of the screen. Normally, these are friends of friends or people that may be in a common group. In many cases this friend generator is how users grow their network and increase the […]
Erdős Number and Small World Phenomenon
The word “small‐world phenomenon” represents highly clustered networks in modern days. The world is indeed small from the viewpoint of dynamic network systems that connect random people. Also closely related to the famous “six degrees of separation,” the theory that everyone is connected at most six steps away from each other, the shrinking world via various […]
Analysis of Wikipedia to Measure Semantic Relatedness
Due to the organic way Wikipedia is continuously grown and modified by a vast number of contributors, the online encyclopedia is uniquely representative of human knowledge. The resource is valuable not only in content, but also its structure. Wikipedia is an enormous network. Each page is a node and the links to and from each […]
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