game theory – Quanta Magazine

Biodiversity May Thrive Through Games of Rock-Paper-Scissors

Carrie Arnold — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 17:05:47 +0000

A pioneer of synthetic biology at the University of California, San Diego, Jeff Hasty has spent his 20-year career designing strategies to make genetic circuits in engineered bacteria work together. But several years ago, Hasty had to admit that even he couldn’t outfox the humble bacterium Escherichia coli. Hasty didn’t have a problem engineering useful, tightly regulated new genetic traits or...

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Viruses Have a Secret, Altruistic Social Life

Viviane Callier — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 15:00:08 +0000

Social organisms come in all shapes and sizes, from the obviously gregarious ones like mammals and birds down to the more cryptic socializers like bacteria. Evolutionary biologists often puzzle over altruistic behaviors among them, because self-sacrificing individuals would at first seem to be at a severe disadvantage under natural selection. William D. Hamilton, one of the 20th century’s most...

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A Poet of Computation Who Uncovers Distant Truths

Erica Klarreich — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 13:00:08 +0000

Scroll down to the bottom of Constantinos Daskalakis’ web page — past links to his theoretical computer science papers and his doctoral students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — and you will come upon a spare, 21-line poem by Constantine Cavafy, “The Satrapy.” Written in 1910, it addresses an unnamed individual who is “made for fine and great works” but who, having met with small...

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Why Winning in Rock-Paper-Scissors (and in Life) Isn’t Everything

Patrick Honner — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 13:52:48 +0000

Rock-Paper-Scissors works great for deciding who has to take out the garbage. But have you ever noticed what happens when, instead of playing best of three, you just let the game continue round after round? At first, you play a pattern that gives you the upper hand, but then your opponent quickly catches on and turns things in her favor. As strategies evolve, a point is reached where neither side...

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Solution: ‘Triumph or Cooperation in Game Theory and Evolution’

Pradeep Mutalik — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 16:20:27 +0000

Our November Insights puzzle set out three scenarios exploring how competition and cooperation are modeled in game theory and how they might actually interact in modifying the equilibrium between two genes. Let’s work through them to gain a deeper appreciation for the intricacies in applying game theory to real-world situations. Morra is a competitive hand-and-finger game played between two...

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