New Species to Human Lineage
Two explorers working with scientists from the University of Witwatersrand discovered the Dinaledi Chamber On September 13, 2013 which contained the first skeletal specimens of a new species in the human lineage. About two years later on September 10, 2015 the scientists publicly announced their findings, calling the new species Homo naledi. According to preliminary […]
The game theory of coup attempts
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/09/10/anyone-planning-a-coup-should-read-this-first/ This article discusses the content of a book that presents political coups as a coordination game, a special class of games where multiple pure strategy Nash equilibria exist. In the situation of a coup, each person has the choice of participating or not, and the payoffs of each choice is dependent on the choice […]
Graph and Game Theory Concepts Applied to the 2016 Presidential Election
So, I read an article recently and the article claimed that Biden running would hurt Hilary a lot more than it would hurt Sanders. Now this really surprised me. A lot of Sanders support is coming from the anyone-but-Hilary demographic. And surely Biden would be an acceptable choice; in fact, since Biden is closer to […]
How the Brain Remembers Complex Relationships
Have you ever wondered how people can remember the structure of the complex social relationships that surround them? Matthew Brashears, a researcher at Cornell, determined that the brain doesn’t remember huge social networks, rather it “cheats” and remembers small components of the network, such as triadic closures, and uses these to reconstruct this complex network. In his […]
The Strength of Weak Ties for Children in Poverty
Multiple studies have shown that the place where people grow up has a large effect on their income for the rest of their life, especially if they are poor. Karl Alexander, a Johns Hopkins University researcher, explained that “Poor children tend to be triply disadvantaged: They experience poverty at home, they experience poverty in their […]
Game Theory, Self Interest, and Unfairness
The Ultimatum Game is a common game examined in game theory. It requires two individuals, a proposer and a responder. The proposer is endowed with a sum of money and proposes to split it with the responder. The responder can accept the split and each receives his or her share. Conversely, the responder can reject, […]
Peers Are Now Paranoid Of Each Other
An easy example of a network in today’s technological environment is a peer to peer file sharing service. It has been known that for a healthy network to exist in a P2P (Peer to Peer) service, there has to be nodes (humans with a computer) giving and receiving data. Some nodes are more generous than […]
The Power of the Influenza Network
The Influenza or ‘flu’ is one of the most widespread and commonly found epidemics in the United States. The flu is caused by a person’s interaction with a number of viruses — primarily the influenza virus. These viruses are airborne and can enter the body through the nostrils or mouth. Surveys have shown that around […]
Traffic Optimization as a Networks Problem
As we saw in the first couple of lectures, networks are structures that can be used to model and solve a multitude of problems. One of the more interesting problems that utilizes graphs as an abstraction is that of road traffic optimization; that is, the optimization of traffic light patterns in a city to minimize the […]
Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma and Long-Term Strategies
http://www.lifl.fr/IPD/references/from_lifl/alife5/html/graduels.html In class, Professor Easley mentioned the prisoner’s dilemma, a well-known game where players can cooperate (“deny”) or defect (“confess”). The prisoner’s dilemma is remarkable in that it has a single Nash Equilibrium where both players defect, yet the payout for mutual cooperation is strictly better. In a single game, the safest choice for […]
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