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He needs the elaborate mathematics because he is trying to make sense of a very complex world: the game of poker. “Even the smallest variant of poker has a billion billion decision points,” he told me. Their work hasn’t just been an academic exercise, however; it has transformed how poker professionals approach the game. In search of ways to improve their odds, pros began poaching Prof. Bowling’s talent. “I regularly get contacted by poker pros asking if I can help them with something. I would say every one of the top 10 pros in the world is paying a poker...

For the win- Covid Game Theory for herd immunity.

SENDING messages into deep space could be the best way for Earthlings to find extraterrestrial intelligence, but it carries a grave risk: alerting hostile aliens to our presence. Game theory may provide a way to navigate this dilemma. So far the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has mostly been restricted to listening for signs of technology elsewhere. Only a few attempts have been made to broadcast messages towards distant stars. Many scientists are against such “active” SETI for fear of revealing our presence. If all aliens feel the same way then no one will be broadcasting, and the chance of...

US mathematician John Nash, whose life story was turned into the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, has died in a car crash, local media has reported. Nash, 86, and his wife Alicia were both killed when their taxi crashed in New Jersey, the reports said. The mathematician is renowned for his work in game theory, winning the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994. His breakthroughs in maths - and his struggles with schizophrenia - were the focus of the film.

That means that this particular variant of poker, called heads-up limit hold’em (HULHE), can be considered solved. ... A few other popular games have been solved before. In particular, in 2007 a team from the same computer-science department at Alberta — including Neil Burch, a co-author of the latest study — cracked draughts, also known as checkers. But poker is harder to solve than draughts. Chess and draughts are examples of perfect-information games, in which players have complete knowledge of all past events and of the present situation in a game. In poker, in contrast, there are some things a...

Meet Arthur Chu, Jeopardy's latest and greatest star, who has used Jeopardy game theory to become nightly must-see TV. But his unorthodox methods — though correct by the numbers — have made him a polarizing figure in the Jeopardy community. Arthur first appeared on the show on Tuesday, and has gone on a nice run of three straight wins. Thus far, he's been quick and confident with his answers and has a good brain on his shoulders. But the story is firmly on how he's playing, as his game theory strategies have made for a frustrating television experience for viewers. Those...

TWO sprinters may have got caught doing it this week. And a cyclist didn’t do it, but it is so common in his sport that what he did do without doing it is even more astonishing. “It” is taking performance-enhancing drugs. The sprinters were Tyson Gay and Asafa Powell, who both failed drug tests (though both deny wrongdoing). The cyclist was Chris Froome, who without pharmaceutical assistance managed a stunning ascent of Mont Ventoux during the Tour de France.Professional sport is rife with drug-taking. Getting caught will get you banned, frequently for life. Yet people carry on doing it regardless....

How to Win a Three-Way Gunfight Truels are things guaranteed to make any Western fifty percent better — by adding a third person to a duel. Each person can choose his or her target, and the worst person might very well be the winner — provided they play it smart. Learn how to win yourself a truel, gunslinger-style. Game theorists have thought about the problem of duels for a long time. As much as the Old West was depicted as a lawless place where anything might happen, it was also known for hanging its criminals high — which meant that...

Reuben and Shimon are placed into a small room with a suitcase containing $100,000 of cash. The owner of the suitcase offers them the following: "I'll give you all the money in the suitcase, but only on the condition that you negotiate and reach an amicable agreement on its division. That’s the only way I will give you the money. " Reuben, who is a rational person, appreciates the golden opportunity presented to him and turns to Shimon with the obvious suggestion: "Come, you take half the amount, I'll take the other half, and each of us will go away...

Everybody knows there’s no such thing as money. So how come everybody acts like it’s real? In particular, why do economists and other similar creatures find the lack of “rationality” curious when reviewing the transactions, and game-theory simulations of transactions, between real people? There do exist bits of shiny metal, certain organic byproducts, and slips of paper that are called “money.” But these objects have no intrinsic value. Money is a concept, not a thing. It is a proxy for agreements between people, a mechanism to ease the trading of things that do have value. Like I said, everybody knows...

The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff W.W. Norton £16.99, 512 pages Was Solomon wise for suggesting a baby be split in two, or just lucky? Lucky, say the authors – two jovial American business school gurus – of The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life. The fake mother should have anticipated Solomon’s cunning. She should have feigned self-sacrifice. His judgement would not then have extracted the truth. The authors then describe ‘the simplest of the devices that would have worked’....

Hormones affect men's sense of fair play 11:33 04 July 2007 NewScientist.com news service Roxanne Khamsi Next time you have to negotiate a deal with a male business contact, you might want to check his hormone levels first. A new study shows that men with high levels of testosterone are more likely to turn down low offers, even if they stand to gain money by accepting them. According to researchers, the finding demonstrates that our hardwired biology can cause us to make irrational economic decisions. In what is known as the "low ultimatum game", an anonymous individual can offer either...

NORRISTOWN, Pa. — A University of Pennsylvania professor was charged Monday with bludgeoning his wife to death in their suburban kitchen after she told friends she was going to divorce him. Rafael Robb, 56, taught economics at the Ivy League school and is an expert in game theory, the study of how people and governments make decisions by calculating what others might do. Robb told investigators he was in Philadelphia when his wife was killed Dec. 22. But prosecutors doubted his alibi. District Attorney Bruce Castor said the crime scene was arranged to make it look as if Robb's wife,...

Whether you’re a free-loading virus or a meat-stealing monkey, selfishness pays. So how could cooperators survive in a cheater’s world? Thomas Flatt, a postdoctoral research associate at Brown, was part of a group that created a theoretical model that neatly solves this dilemma, which has stumped evolutionary biologists and social scientists for decades. The trick: Keep the altruists in small groups, away from the swindling horde, where they multiply and migrate. It’s a truth borne out in biology and economics: Selfishness pays. Viruses can steal enzymes to reproduce. Tax evaders can take advantage of public services to survive and thrive....

Three simple games determine when and why humans cooperate Look around you. If you're reading this, it means that you are embedded in a world-spanning network of cooperation. It’s embodied in the computer and the screen you’re using. It probably comes from somewhere in Asia and its parts were designed, manufactured, and assembled in factories employing thousands of people scattered across the globe. Its parts are made from minerals and plastics that likely come from all six inhabited continents. The electricity used to power your desktop or laptop streams in through a network of wires connecting you to a power...

...Mr. Schelling's early work was on the most important issue of the Cold War: preventing it from becoming a Hot War. In his classic 1960 book "The Strategy of Conflict," Mr. Schelling, who had spent a year at the RAND Corporation, laid out some important applications of game theory to the issue of nuclear war. In one passage, he discussed the U.S.-Soviet conflict in terms anyone could relate to: a hypothetical duel. He wrote that "if both [duelists] were assured of living long enough to shoot back with unimpaired aim, there would be no advantage in jumping the gun and...

In a finding that could help explain why a sucker never gets an even break, scientists are reporting today that they have succeeded in visualizing feelings of trust developing in a specific region of the brain. In the study, pairs of anonymous subjects were strapped into magnetic resonance imaging scanners 1,500 miles apart. The participants played 10 consecutive rounds of a risk-taking game that involved balancing monetary profit and trust. While they played, the scanners, synchronized through the Internet, measured how the subjects' brains reacted. With the development of trusting feelings, increased blood flow occurred in the caudate nucleus, an...

Revenge makes your dayBy Lauran NeergaardSeptember 28, 2004 DIRTY Harry had it right: brain scans show revenge really can make your day. Planning revenge sparks enough satisfaction to motivate getting even - and the level of satisfaction predicts who will go to greater lengths to do so, say Swiss researchers who monitored brain activity during a game of double-cross. The study illustrates growing interest in the interaction between emotion and cognition - which in turn influences fields such as how to model the economy better. The new study chips "yet another sliver from the rational model of economic man", said...

A pair of rabbits are put in a field and, if rabbits take a month to become mature and then produce a new pair every month after that, how many pairs will there be in twelve months time? Somewhere around 1200 A.D. an Italian mathematician who went by the pen-name Fibonacci pondered this very problem, a task made a bit easier by his pioneering adoption of the Hindu-Arabic numeric system. The 1,1,2,3,5,8... sequence which resulted is known as the Fibonacci Sequence, and it's connected to both the critical artistic concept of the "golden section" and the "propagating spiral." Hmmm. Breeding...

When Michael Waltrip feinted briefly, sped in close behind another car, and then whipped past Jimmie Johnson to win the rain-shortened Daytona 500 on Sunday, the crowds surrounding the track, screaming through mouthfuls of $7 chili dogs and a sea of Confederate flags, cheered with wild glee. The Excitement! The Noise! The Complexity Theory! So an economics professor goes to the Daytona 500 … It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But for game theorists, stock car racing is emerging as an unlikely laboratory for understanding the world. A 2002 Rand Corp. paper titled "Social Science at 190...