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Game Theory in the Dark Knight

Spoiler Alert: If you have not seen the movie The Dark Knight, then do not read this article. In the movie The Dark Knight, there is a scene where the Joker holds two ferries hostage. Both ferries are wired with explosives, and each ferry’s occupants hold the detonator for the other boat. The Joker is […]

User Acquisition in Dense Social Networks

Smart phone applications are quickly becoming incredibly pervasive. The number of total downloads has grown 8-fold from 2011 to 2015, from about 25 billion to over 200. Applications are quickly expanding into all parts of our lives: from simply phone calls and texting to navigation, money management, and even dating. One of the largest dating […]

Graph Theory’s Use in Early 21st Century US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine

In his paper for the 2012 Political Networks Conference and Workshops at the University of Colorado in Boulder, sociology professor David Knoke discusses the relatively successful implementation of General Stanley McChrystal’s Counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, as documented in US Army Field Manual 3-24 (FM3-24), in Iraq, as well as its relative failure in Afghanistan. FM3-24 acknowledged the changing […]

The Role of Nash Equilibria in Military Strategy

Military strategists have discussed how to peacefully maintain order and defense in the world. An article written by an online Pakistani newspaper (linked below) discusses the roll of game theory in the decision to disarm or initiate war. India and Pakistan have been at odds for the last century. The tension between the countries results […]

Game Theory and Cancer Treatment

Recently, doctors and researchers have begun to observe and analyze the behavior of cancer cells as a type of game. The growth and metastasis of cancer cells in human tissue appear to resemble the growth and propagation of animals in an evolutionary game, and the local interactions between cancer cells is comparable to cooperative and […]

Advanced Algorithm Makes Poker a Solved Game

    Oskari Tammelin, a Finnish software engineer, and a team of computer scientists from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, lead by Michael Bowling, have created an algorithm that can play poker perfectly.  The algorithm plays a variant of poker called heads-up limit hold’em (texas hold’em with two players), so well, “as to […]

An Introductory Analysis of Competitive Pokemon Using Game Theory

At the heart of the Pokemon role-playing games is a turn-based battling feature in which two players try to reduce the health points (HP) of all six of the opponent’s Pokemon to zero, one Pokemon at a time. This competitive aspect of Pokemon assumes the players have spent an unlimited amount of time in preparing […]

Game Theory and Politics: What Mario Kart Can Teach Us About 2016

The article elaborated on the recent trend of the 2016 presidential election, and drew an analogy to people’s strategy for playing video games. Donald Trump was once getting 40 percent of the vote, and the other 60 percent was divided evenly among all other candidates. While the 40 percent is still less than half, but […]

Game Theory and Vaccination

A couple months ago, the state of California passed a law that makes vaccination obligatory in public and private schools. A wise decision, given that a growing number of parents, scared of possible side effects, decide not to vaccinate their children. Although vaccination might not be 100% effective, it’s still the best way of preventing a […]

A game-theory based agent-cellular model for use in urban growth simulation

In “A game-theory based agent-cellular model for use in urban growth simulation: A case study of the rapidly urbanizing Wuhan area of central China”, the authors presented a crucial issue in the 21st century. Urbanization is a process that large rural population migration into cities with rate of urban expansion. In order to analyze the reason […]

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