Learn Game Theory, for Free, from Stanford Professors

December 15, 2011 1 Comment

Ever wanted to dip your toes into the ocean of Game Theory?  Want to do it for free?

Now you can! Stanford’s offering several free courses online, starting in February.  A few of my esteemed Google colleagues pointed me towards this Game Theory class. It’s being taught by the inestimable Matthew O. Jackson and Yoav Shoham.

Here’s a description of the class:

Popularized by movies such as “A Beautiful Mind”, game theory is the mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and irrational) agents. Beyond what we call ‘games’ in common language, such as chess, poker, soccer, etc., it includes the modeling of conflict among nations, political campaigns, competition among firms, and trading behavior in markets such as the NYSE. How could you begin to model eBay, Google keyword auctions, and peer to peer file-sharing networks, without accounting for the incentives of the people using them? The course will provide the basics: representing games and strategies, the extensive form (which computer scientists call game trees), Bayesian games (modeling things like auctions), repeated and stochastic games, and more. We’ll include a variety of examples including classic games and a few applications.

There won’t be a lot of heavy math, and the lecture videos will broken into small chunks, usually between eight and twelve minutes each.

I signed up!  Let me know if you did, too, and we can work on this together.

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Economists Duke It Out, complete with Hip-Hop music video

April 28, 2011 5 Comments

The intersection of boxing, hip-hop, and economics: not much could be better than that.

This video, titled “Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two,” really speaks for itself.  Click below to watch it.

From Wikipedia:

John Maynard Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, overturning the older ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would in the short to medium term automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. Keynes instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment.

Friedrich August Hayek is best known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought. Hayek’s account of how changing prices communicate signals which enable individuals to coordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics.Hayek also produced significant work in the fields of systems thinking, jurisprudence, neuroscience and the history of ideas.

The lyrics for Round Two can be found here. The video for Round One is here.

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Carrying Books is Ridiculously Primitive

January 22, 2011 10 Comments

Unfortunately, although I was registered, I was unable to attend Consumer Electronics Show this year.  However, the Mayor of San Clemente – also an English teacher – did attend. She wrote an exclusive guest post for Game Theory Ninja.

Full disclosure – the mayor of San Clemente may or may not be my mother, and I may or may not have encouraged her to attend.  Here’s what she had to say about the event.

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“Carrying books is ridiculously primitive” –Walter Mossberg, 2011 CES

Xerox corporation contributed close to a half billion dollars to U.S. education in the past decade. Was it worth it? According to Chairman and CEO Ursula Burns, the return on investment isn’t clear. If that investment were held to the standards of other Xerox investments, it would not make the cut for future funding.

The message from CES 2011: U.S. education is caught in a growing squeeze play. On one side, U.S. business is moving on all fronts to lead global innovation. On the other side, most of that technology doesn’t make it to the classroom, and many of the students who will contribute to the U.S. economy might not even be growing up in the United States. Read more of this post

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The GPS of your Mind

November 20, 2010 Leave a comment

Alex Terrazas is the President and Chief Scientist at MediaBalance, Inc.  The company’s mission is to bring high technology and behavioral psychology to bear on the nation’s most critical health problems.

In his talk, titled “What Train-Driving Rats Can Tell Us about Memory in Virtual Environments,” Terrazas talked about cognitive mapping, which is, basically, how your mind creates geographic maps.  Terrazas equated it to the GPS of your mind.  What are we doing to our brains, he wonders, by using all of this mapping technology, like Google Maps, GPS, and Mapquest?  Do these technologies change the way we synthesize and store locational information?

Terrazas focused on the hippocampus, where spacial location information and memory is stored.  His conclusion is that, in order to understand our physical surroundings, or the layout of a city, we may need to physically walk around in order to map it to our brains.  That is to say, we need to walk around – not use GPS devices or Google Maps – to understand where things lie relative to each other.

This has profound implications for the future of virtual reality and virtual learning.  It could be that there are some things that we do need to learn the traditional way – i.e., physically, or in person, and not virtually.

Terrazas concluded: “We either need to throw away our GPS devices or find another use for our hippocampus.”

I followed up with Terrazas via Twitter after the event – I’m interested in learning more.  I’ll post on whatever I find out.

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Thinking about Thinking Recap

October 22, 2010 1 Comment

In the Information Overload series, we discussed the concept of distilling information down to manageable, bite-sized summaries.  In the Thinking about Thinking series, we talked about the need for deep thought and fleshed-out ideas.

For those of you in the Information Overload camp, here’s a summary of everything we talked about in the Thinking about Thinking series.  For those if you who want to read more, click through to read the entire series, in all of its glory.

  1. Thinking About Thinking. In this introductory post on how technology is rewiring our brains, we looked at some of the reasons this series is worth your time to read.  These included our increased penchant for multitasking, the ability of internet use to change our mental processes, and our affinity for each new electronic notification text message.
  2. Do We Really Need Deep Thought? The media we consume is decreasing in size, and, thus, depth of information.  Does that mean our thoughts are adjusting accordingly?  Most scientific breakthroughs actually do require deep thought – the “Ah-ha” moment is a myth.
  3. Are We Addicted? Our Brains On Technology. This post looks at the science behind addiction, and how some of that science shows our brains react to technology in the same way they react to other addictions.
  4. The Opposite of Technology. Studies show that being in – or thinking about – nature causes our brains to make connections.  Conversely, being in or thinking about man-made environments, like cities and highways causes our thoughts to become scattered and jumbled.
  5. Getting off of Social Media. This post took it one step further, and  looked at organizations and people who are turning off their technology and social media connections.  We borrowed the term Countertrend – a social backlash to a trend – to describe the phenomenon.
  6. Conclusion: Circuits and Cerebellums. In this final post, we talked about some suggestions for dealing with all of this technology.

On Monday, I’ll be attending FailCon 2010. According to the website, “FailCon is the premier conference on start-up failures and how to prepare and recover from them.” Panelists include representatives from Etsy, the New York Times, Formspring, Twitter, Zappos, and more.  Look forward to posts about failure – then subsequent success.

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