Redefining social networks
Social networks today have a few major flaws. They tend to be clustered, segmented, and are really representations of only our strongest ties. While this is good to keep in touch with our close friends, we do not need a social network to do this. As we grow our networks on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even […]
Procedural Dungeon Generation
In roguelike games, the game designer must generate a random dungeon for the player to traverse. The generated dungeon consists of rectangular rooms and single-tile-wide hallways, and ideally has neither too many nor too few of either. How can the designer make such a dungeon, given an assortment of rooms? To generate a floor, the algorithm […]
How Whatsapp took over India
As every Indian telecom company will sadly admit, their revenues from text messages have significantly fallen in the past few years, thanks to Whatsapp messenger. A phenomenal shift of consumers from the traditional texting SMS and MMS to Whatsapp, started among the tech savvy youngsters, quickly spread to the older population once everyone started realizing […]
Socially-conscious investing optimized through Game theory
Investment theory follows a fairly simple premise of optimizing two primary factors of any investment: risk and reward (return). Although investors debate the most accurate ways to measure these factors, which often vary depending on the investment type or category, virtually all investments can be reduced to an attempt to maximize estimated return and minimize […]
The Dangers of Networks
Last month, an on-air shooting at a news station in Roanoke, Virginia made headline news. Vester Flanagan, who worked under the name Bryce Williams, shot his former WDBJ-TV colleagues, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, in the middle of a live interview. The shooting was not only caught on film by the camerapeople filming the interview, […]
Game Theory in Elections: 3-Cornered Fights And Spoiling Your Vote
In 2011, the Singaporean presidential election winner won with only 35% of the vote. How? The blame goes to the one-ballot, one-vote system that Singapore employs. Because of this, a third-party candidate has a much higher potential to become “spoiler” to a more popular candidate with similar views, thus causing a less popular candidate to […]
Who Knew We Use Game Theory In Everyday Life?
I found this article to be very interesting and relatable. When I’m taking a test, and I don’t know the answer to a question, I find myself trying to make an educated guess. I don’t really think about it too much except I am probably going to get this wrong so it can’t hurt to […]
The Prisoners’ Dilemma of Modern American Politics
The modern American political system has become extremely polarized over the last two decades. In 1994, 64% of Republicans were more conservative than the median Democrat while 70% of Democrats were more liberal than the median Republican. By 2014, those numbers increased drastically to 92% and 94%, respectively. What those numbers and their corresponding graphs […]
Artificial Neural Networks
Although artificial neural networks have been around since the 1940s, until recently they have been removed from mainstream news. However, when Google Research recently began working on analyzing the information stored in the hidden layers of trained neural networks, the results (frequently called “Deep Dream”) began showing up in videos and on mainstream news and […]
Competitive Devaluation and the Prisoner’s Dilemma
With recent turbulence plaguing the once unfaltering Chinese economy, China’s economic growth seems to have entered an uncertain stage where expansion rates have drastically declined. Over the past few months, the Chinese stock market suffered a series of major losses, leading local and foreign investors alike to pull billions of dollars out of the system. […]
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