The Small World of Words: Mapping the Mental Lexicon
Graphs provide a common language to represent networks that at first glance are nothing alike, from friendships on social media to interstate traffic patterns. One ambitious project is attempting to model the network of all word associations in the collective mental lexicon of native speakers. Called the “Small World of Words,” it began at a […]
Air Traffic Control Networks
https://www.eurocontrol.int/articles/air-traffic-flow-and-capacity-management One of the large scale networks in our everyday lives can be found in the airline industry. Planning for the flights that are scheduled to depart from a local airport are planned a year in advance until one week before departure. In preparation for the flight, a flight path for each plane is structured […]
Graph Theory Modeling: Effects of Segmented Forests and Habitat Availability for Birds
Between landscapes of mountains and forests, nature’s unrelenting hand carves valleys between the wakes of glaciers, breathes new life to cooling lava, and over time unpretentiously shapes the world around us. There is a beauty in the balance of the ecosystems around the earth. Unfortunately with the onset of modernization, nature’s temperate divides have been […]
Products designed to fail. A game that could have consumers losing trust in companies
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/magazine/why-apple-wants-to-bust-your-iphone.html?_r=0 The term to focus on here is, “planned obsolescence”. A real estate broker first coined the term during the great depression. He suggested that the US government should place untrue expiration dates on goods to make consumers buy new ones before necessary (New York Times). In modern times this term is relevant to all […]
Terrorism From the Terrorists’ Point of View
One of the tools used to analyze terrorist activity is game theory. In many papers on terrorism and game theory, the terrorists are seen as the passive or responding party. This is logical thought process, as it is reasonable to believe that in order to inflict as many mass casualties as possible on Americans and […]
Competitive Arousal: The Magic Behind Overpaying
It was hard to wrap my head around the idea of auctions being a mathematical model. Set a value for the item, and bid until that value is reached. This is what was shown in lecture today, and is clearly the logical solution for the “game” that is the auction. Don’t buy anything for more […]
Searching for a Common Ancestor
There is a common interview prep question that goes by “the most recent common ancestor” (MRCA) problem. The question is usually stated like this: Given two arbitrary nodes in a binary tree, find a common ancestor node between the two nodes (a node is a common ancestor if there exists paths starting from the node […]
Networks and Intergroup relation of cultural groups
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~rascl/assets/mendoza%20pdfs/Mendoza-Denton_2007-2.pdf The article Network of Meaning argues about why different cultural groups based race, nationality, and religion, view each other so much differently and discriminatively from their own. This article is a social phenomenon that corresponds to the property of networks when they have positive and negative links according to the Theory of Structural Balance. […]
Real World Hawk-Dove Game in Nature
For the first time in history, scientists have identified a population of birds that actually play out the hawk-dove game naturally. And to make it even better, the animal population are birds! As discussed in class, the hawk-dove game is a model of a situation where being aggressive pays off if and only if the […]
The inconsistency in Prisoner’s Dilemma
In class, we covered a concept called the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’. This idea outlining game theory, as presented, follows a sure-thing policy which implies that a player will strive to compete for the highest amount of gain (whether in points or less jail time). While, this is very likely in most cases, there is a human […]
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