The game theory exam story
UCLA animal behavior professor Peter Nonacs describes his experiment in learning by doing: “Cheating to Learn: How a UCLA professor gamed a game theory midte...
All posts tagged with game theory
Microchimerism and selection
A recent article in Scientific American by Robert Martone explains some recent research on how fetal cells become integrated into mothers’ brains for the lon...
A new approach to the Prisoner's Dilemma
Daniel Lende has described some evolutionary and anthropological import of a recent paper in PNAS on game theory: “Prisoners Dilemma and the Evolution of Ine...
Inclusive fitness works
I can’t believe the amount of attention the paper by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson Nowak:eusociality:2010 has gotten. It was in last week...
Hangman strategy
You may have seen that story about “jazz” being the hardest Hangman word. Personally, I always figure that such a short word is hardly fair, but I’m not that...
A Snowdrift game version of hunting
I want to run through some examples of how we can apply game theory to consider hunting decisions in human groups. First, I describe a simple Snowdrift model...
Snowdrift games, cooperation, and "tragedy of the commune"
It’s the second day of June, which means it’s a good time to consider snowdrifts. OK, maybe not – but at least we’re far enough from ...
Thomas Schelling on military strategy and academia
Thomas Schelling, on page 8 of his The Strategy of Conflict (Amazon):
Reviewing frequency-dependent selection on MHC
Mystery Rays from Outer Space wrote earlier this month about the pattern of selection on MHC, bringing up the question of whether overdominance (heterozygot...
Nowak profiled
Carl Zimmer's profile of mathematical biologist Martin Nowak is well worth reading. Zimmer does a good job of describing the relevance of Nowak's modeling w...
And you thought emus came in mobs
AP writer Randolph Schmid tells the story of the cowbird protection racket:
Game theory and developmental robusticity
The introduction of game theory into evolutionary biology is often credited to George Price and John Maynard Smith. This is for good reason; together they w...
A little game theory
The second week of theory in my seminar focuses on John Maynard Smith and evolutionary game theory.
When lion consorts go wild
These are some notes on game theory and social behavior in lions. In his book, Evolution and the Theory of Games, John Maynard Smith includes a chapter on a...
A little game theory history
I've been working through the book, Evolutionary Game Theory, by Jörgen Weibull, and it has a really concise two-page history of game theory (as applie...
Trust and verify
About those cheap mental scanners, there's this paper from last week by Damon Tomlin and colleagues, which relied on brain scans to determine the cortical c...
Icons without the eyes
I've been keeping a few articles on my desktop that seem to follow a theme -- the notion of using technology to communicate visual signs through other sense...
Cooperation, phenotypic vectors, energy
Burtsev and Turchin (2006) present the results of simulations of cooperative behavior in self-interested agents. This is a well-established subject, and the...