Mathematician David Strütt, a scientific collaborator at EPFL, worked for four months to develop Matheminecraft, a math video game in Minecraft, where the gamer has to find a Eulerian cycle in a graph. Minecraft is a sandbox ...
Mathematics
Apr 21, 2020
0
505
(Phys.org) —A trio of researchers at Zhejiang University in China has found a way for players to improve their odds of winning when playing the hand game rock-paper-scissors. In their paper they've uploaded to the preprint ...
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from Australia have taken a step toward resolving a seemingly simple yet unsolved paradox known as the "two-envelope" problem. They’ve worked out a new strategy that can enable a player to beat ...
Leading physicists last year turned game theory on its head by giving selfish players a sure bet to beat cooperative players. Now two evolutionary biologists at Michigan State University offer new evidence that the selfish ...
Evolution
Aug 1, 2013
15
0
New research in game theory shows that people are naturally predisposed to over-use "common-pool resources" such as transportation systems and fisheries even if it risks failure of the system, to the detriment of society ...
Mathematics
Sep 29, 2016
9
1533
(Phys.org) —A deep link between two seemingly unconnected areas of modern science has been discovered by researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Geneva.
Quantum Physics
Jul 12, 2013
19
2
A mathematician from RUDN University developed a matrix representation of set functions. This approach is vivid and easy to check, and it makes the calculations easier. Among other things, the new development can be applied ...
Mathematics
Dec 1, 2020
0
5
Conventional wisdom holds that it's not what you know, it's who you know. But now scientists studying networking are starting to realize that when it comes to much in life, it's also who the people you know know, and perhaps ...
Social Sciences
Mar 22, 2009
0
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- All retail companies want to maximize their profits, while at the same time maintaining high market share compared with their competitors. One way to do this is by promising to offer the lowest prices in ...
When we ask friends if we can stay at their place, we prefer them to say yes without asking details such as for how long. Yet, if the answer is going to be no, then we often prefer them to seek more information from us first. ...
Social Sciences
Jan 6, 2017
0
1595
Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is used in the social sciences (most notably economics), biology, engineering, political science, international relations, computer science, and philosophy. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others. While initially developed to analyze competitions in which one individual does better at another's expense (zero sum games), it has been expanded to treat a wide class of interactions, which are classified according to several criteria. Today, "game theory is a sort of umbrella or 'unified field' theory for the rational side of social science, where 'social' is interpreted broadly, to include human as well as non-human players (computers, animals, plants)" (Aumann 1987).
Traditional applications of game theory attempt to find equilibria in these games. In an equilibrium, each player of the game has adopted a strategy that they are unlikely to change. Many equilibrium concepts have been developed (most famously the Nash equilibrium) in an attempt to capture this idea. These equilibrium concepts are motivated differently depending on the field of application, although they often overlap or coincide. This methodology is not without criticism, and debates continue over the appropriateness of particular equilibrium concepts, the appropriateness of equilibria altogether, and the usefulness of mathematical models more generally.
Although some developments occurred before it, the field of game theory came into being with the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. This theory was developed extensively in the 1950s by many scholars. Game theory was later explicitly applied to biology in the 1970s, although similar developments go back at least as far as the 1930s. Game theory has been widely recognized as an important tool in many fields. Eight game theorists have won Nobel prizes in economics, and John Maynard Smith was awarded the Crafoord Prize for his application of game theory to biology.
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