Per previous post, Stanford is offering a free online Game Theory course. And this Ninja is hosting study sessions on Google+. And you’re invited!
What: Game Theory Ninjas in Training.
When: Tuesdays at 5pm PST, starting March 27th.
Where: Google Hangouts!
If you want to join us, add me on Google+ and comment on this post. I’ll add you to the study session circle. The invite for the hangout is going to be private to those in the circle; that will help us keep the conversation relevant to the class. That said, obviously feel free to invite anyone who’s taking the class to join us.
For those in the Bay Area/near Mountain View: If you want to join me live, let me know! I’ll be in a conference room on Google campus, and am happy to share the IRL collaboration love.
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.
Suppose you find yourself in an unfamiliar environment where you don’t know how to get food, avoid predators, or travel from A to B. Would you invest time working out what to do on your own, or observe other individuals and copy them? If you copy, who would you copy? The first individual you see? The most succesful individual? The most common behaviour? Do you always copy, or do so selectively? If you could refine behaviours, would you invest time in that or let others do it for you? What if you then migrated – would you rely on your existing knowledge, or copy the locals?
Interested in joining the team? If you’re in the Bay Area and can commit to meeting up for at least an hour a week, send a quick email with a paragraph about yourself to lisa@gametheoryninja.com. We move fast in Silicon Valley; submissions are due Wednesday, Sept 28 at 5pm PST.
Can’t join the team? We’re still looking for a team name. Leave suggestions in the comments. The more ridiculous, the better.
Ray Kurzweil didn’t even attend his own conference this year.
And perhaps that’s not a bad thing.
Kurzweil is the futurist generally credited with forwarding the idea of the Singularity. In conjunction with the Singularity Institute and Peter Thiel, Kurzweil founded the Singularity Summit conference in 2006 to encourage dialog about his idea.
His talk, similarly to the one he presented at World Futures, wasn’t elucidating. He blasted through a slide deck of exponential growth graphs, which were essentially the graphs from his 2005 book with a few extra years of data tacked on. Suffice to say the audience reception was lukewarm.
The premise of Kurzweil’s talk was that we’ll be able to reverse engineer a brain within the next ten years.
His thesis was promptly and roundly assaulted by the media. In an attack that very quickly turned into a public debate, PZ Myers wrote last week, “There [Kurzweil] goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality.” Myers heatedly pointed out a number of apparent logical errors and evidence of basic misunderstandings of biology in Kurzweil’s talk. Kurzweil answered Myers’s critiques in an open letter that essentially regurgitates the Law of Accelerating Change. Myers crafted another scathing post in reply.
This weekend, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to visit Singularity University, at NASA Ames in Mountain View. The university aims to “assemble, educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.” Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis founded the program in 2007. Currently, Singularity U is hosting 80 students from all over the world for the annual 10-week program. The program, which features a variety of speakers and tours, culminates at the end of this week with student project presentations.
However, according to one student at the university, Singularity U tries very hard to disassociate itself from many of Kurzweil’s ideologies. The students at Singularity U very firmly do not call themselves Singularitarians, viewing such ardent followers of Kurzweil as rather cultish. Singularity U students don’t focus on the blending of humans and mechanics. Instead, they’re really only interested in exponential growth of technology. Apparently it’s a PR nightmare trying to explain that subtle difference to the media.
While it’s clear that Kurzweil contributed to, and essentially founded, the Singularity movement, it may be that his best contributions to the field are in the past. I think that the organizers of Singularity Summit realized that this year, which could have been one of the reasons Kurzweil did not attend live.
The Singularity movement has expanded far beyond its roots. It’s grown past Kurzweil’s definition of it, to include an ever-increasing range of ideas, sciences, and academic fields. While Kurzweil’s contributions have undoubtedly been substantial, it may be time to admit that the field has outgrown the founder.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a new website for MBA hopefuls, called, Poets and Quants, “aims to eventually give students in-depth looks at hundreds of degree programs, including what he calls the brutal truth about facilities, teaching methods and reputations.”
They even have an article titled “Blogging Your Way to an MBA.” It discusses the growing trend of business schools asking a few current MBA students to blog about their experiences at their respective school. Apparently, such bloggers are very attractive to recruiters. I hope business schools feel the same way about their blogging MBA applicants …
