Well this sucks a big dick....

It's good.

Most people know him from the movie, which is more about his personal struggles with illness.

His contribution to history with game theory got him a Nobel prize. It's invaluable work.

What's game theory?
 
What's game theory?

Here's a short scene from the movie explaining how it would work if you wanted to get laid as a group of guys going after a group of girls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CemLiSI5ox8

As he says, Adam Smith, who wrote "The Wealth Of Nations" - a book on which a great deal of modern capitalist theory was written, said that every man going after his own best interest is in the best interests of the group.

Adam Smith is modeled more against nature, how the fittest survive, Darwinian.

John Nash explains it's an incomplete model, that an individual needs to act according to what they need, but also according to what the group needs.

It's a refinement of social strategy from straight personal aggression to more considered choices. Game theory explores those choices.

Example:

Prisoner's dilemma:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

"The prisoner's dilemma is a canonical example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two purely "rational" individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best intereststo do so. It was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence rewards and gave it the name "prisoner's dilemma" (Poundstone, 1992), presenting it as follows:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The prosecutors do not have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. Here is the offer: If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison

If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa)

If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on the lesser charge)

It is implied that the prisoners will have no opportunity to reward or punish their partner other than the prison sentences they get, and that their decision will not affect their reputation in the future. Because betraying a partner offers a greater reward than cooperating with him, all purely rational self-interested prisoners would betray the other, and so the only possible outcome for two purely rational prisoners is for them to betray each other.

The interesting part of this result is that pursuing individual reward logically leads both of the prisoners to betray, when they would get a better reward if they both cooperated. In reality, humans display a systematic bias towards cooperative behavior in this and similar games, much more so than predicted by simple models of "rational" self-interested action. A model based on a different kind of rationality, where people forecast how the game would be played if they formed coalitions and then they maximize their forecasts, has been shown to make better predictions of the rate of cooperation in this and similar games given only the payoffs of the game.

There is also an extended "iterated" version of the game, where the classic game is played over and over between the same prisoners, and consequently, both prisoners continuously have an opportunity to penalize the other for previous decisions. If the number of times the game will be played is known to the players, then (by backward induction) two classically rational players will betray each other repeatedly, for the same reasons as the single shot variant. In an infinite or unknown length game there is no fixed optimum strategy, and Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments have been held to compete and test algorithms.

The prisoner's dilemma game can be used as a model for many real world situations involving cooperative behaviour. In casual usage, the label "prisoner's dilemma" may be applied to situations not strictly matching the formal criteria of the classic or iterative games: for instance, those in which two entities could gain important benefits from cooperating or suffer from the failure to do so, but find it merely difficult or expensive, not necessarily impossible, to coordinate their activities to achieve cooperation."

+++++

Prisoner's dilemma...why snitches get stitches.

+++++

Another very good author of modern game theory is Dan Ariely, and his work is fucking amazing.

Truth.
 
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Very sad news.
But.

Why the fuck weren't they wearing seatbelts?
I see it all the time here too....people somehow think taxis are immune to accidents?
Stupidity :(
 
I don't know much about him, but I read something somewhere about him being paranoid schizophrenic and that's the thinking behind game theory.
 

He's a moron, its far more than that, but he's from the school of eyer, its all about trying to take advantage of the opposite sex,

Without these posts he probably thought game theory was about a Rubik's cube.
 
He's a moron, its far more than that, but he's from the school of eyer, its all about trying to take advantage of the opposite sex,

Without these posts he probably thought game theory was about a Rubik's cube.

Who, rosco?

I love rosco. Even rosco can't stop me from loving rosco.
 
Very sad news.
But.

Why the fuck weren't they wearing seatbelts?
I see it all the time here too....people somehow think taxis are immune to accidents?
Stupidity :(

Taxi's don't always have seatbelts.
 
Taxi's don't always have seatbelts.

Taxis do. Limos and busses and party vans don't.

I don't understand why either. The lobbyists must have their fingers in some ass on the Potomac.


They'll land the plane if you refuse to seat belt in one, but you can float around Manhattan in the back of a van with no safety and a drink in your hand too.

Tracey Morgan is a good example as well as these two projectiles mentioned above.
 
I like that Killswitch is pretending that he'd heard of Nash before the news release about his death.
 
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