Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was shot dead by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, catalyzing World War 1. It is often questioned how the assassination of one person could birth one of the deadliest wars in human history. Graphs shed light on how this was possible. First, consider this graph highlighting the alliances of […]
Social Dilemmas and Game Theory
This article discussed the psychological idea of “Social Dilemmas” of which, game theory can be applied. A social dilemma is a task in which the non-cooperative payoff for a player exceeds the cooperative payoff. However, if most people in the network fail to cooperate, everyone suffers. The author provided the example of littering, citing that […]
Making Friends of Friends Benefits Hyenas
A team of researchers at University of Pennsylvania studied the social interactions of spotted hyenas over two decades in order to better understand the social dynamics within a non-human species. For some background, hyenas move around in groups called clans, which can vary in size, but usually up to one hundred individuals. They discovered that hyenas […]
Can Game Theory Save Greece from Debt?
In 2014, the current Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, released a 300 page book on game theory. His co-author, Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap, said that financial negotiations employs the principles of game theory. One of these principle is that the people who are the most likely to concede in a negotiation are those who have […]
Colonel Blotto Game
In this article, researchers study the Colonel Blotto game. The game provides each of two players the same starting number of troops, and each player must decide how to allocate these troops among five territories. A player wins a territory by allocating more troops to that territory than does the other player, and a player […]
Game Show “Golden Balls” epitomizes Game Theory
I came across this very interesting game show called “Golden Balls.” This game is similar to many American game shows — it involves competing individuals who are ultimately trying to get as much money out of the game as they can. Golden balls involves two players who progressively build up a jackpot of money, and […]
Exploitation of Triadic Closure on Social Media
In social networks, triadic closure can be used to forecast certain relationships. For instance, if two people have ties with a third person, there is an increased probability of the two people becoming friends. The triadic closure principle also extends to social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Although triadic closure encourages the formation […]
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