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Free teaching tools
Recent Major Posts
- Pratt Institute holds 124th Commencement, special gallery show
- Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
- Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
- My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
- Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
- Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
- Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
- Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
- Concept mapping as a creative tool
- Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
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Recent Minor Posts
- Useful guides for writing good pseudocode
- The benefits of a maintaining a relatively small in-group
- Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
- NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
- Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
- Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
- Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
- Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
- “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
- Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
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What I am reading now
Category Archives: Game Theory
Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
arXiv “Self-Organization Promotes the Evolution of Cooperation with Cultural Propagation“
Freeman Dyson wins the contest, and then says the contest is stupid
Institute for Advanced Study “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” One of my favorite skateboarders when I was young was Natas Kaupas, an innovative skater who pioneered a lot of modern streetstyle. Natas was one of those skaters who could do things that … Continue reading
Making the formation of social networks more realistic also makes them more cooperative
Physical Review E “Building cooperative networks“
Freeman Dyson calls the Prisoner’s Dilemma “an amusing toy”
This is from the events calendar of Howard University, where Freeman Dyson gave a talk on October 12, 2012. Just in case this disappears from the web, here is the abstract of his talk: “The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Is it a … Continue reading
Can neuroeconomics help economics become a real science?
The Chronicle of Higher Education “The Marketplace in Your Brain” I think that this article suggests that much of economics is not much of a science. Faced with new information, mainstream economics has failed to update its models of how … Continue reading
What’s ironic is that the creationists do not realize that we evolutionists might be trying to understand their success
CreationRevolution “If Morality Evolved, Is It Righteous?” It is striking how this reaction lacks any self-consciousness. Research like that referred to in this post is a potential means of understanding how religions and their particular constructed righteousness (in other words … Continue reading
Posted in A Minor Post, Altruism, Cooperation, Creationism, Cultural Evolution, Game Theory, Punishment, Web
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Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
The Society Pages “Progressing from game theory to agent based modelling to simulate social emergence” This is a nice albeit pretty choppy explanation for why we should not listen to orthodox/traditional game theorists. The only argument I see missing here … Continue reading
Punishment, properly rewarded, can promote cooperation without corruption
Public Library of Science ONE “Evolving Righteousness in a Corrupt World” In the race to build the next over-simplified model of cooperative dynamics, it will be interesting to see how the media runs with this one. Is this a “scientists … Continue reading
Despite great press for Dyson, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is still not the solution to human cooperation
The Chronicle of Higher Education “To the Trickster Go the Spoils” I really appreciate that Freeman Dyson acknowledges so clearly in this article that the fact that he has found a deceitful solution to the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma does not … Continue reading
If your loners are truly loners they won’t punish, and cooperation thrives even in the presence of antisocial punishment
Last summer I discussed a paper by Rand and Nowak that explored the dynamics of antisocial punishment in groups composed of cooperators, defectors, and loners playing a public goods game. In a conventional public goods game, at least some players … Continue reading
Scientific American “Why We Help”
The July issue of Scientific American features a cover story written by Martin A. Nowak called “Why We Help“. This very short article contains a brief review of Nowak’s “five rules” for cooperation, a little bit of connection to experimental work … Continue reading
Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
In the Fall of 2011 I began a new project with Greg Riestenberg, a graduate student in Pratt’s Communications Design program. Given the ubiquity — especially in recent times — of evolutionary game theory, you would think that someone would have produced … Continue reading
Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: Ultimatum Game “conceptual” images
UPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. To complete the set of Evolutionary Games Infographic images that Greg Riestenberg and I have been working on, we created a set of … Continue reading
Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “sequence” images
UPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. This semester I have been working with Greg Riestenberg, a graduate student in Pratt’s Communications Design program, to come up with a new … Continue reading
Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: New “conceptual” images
UPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. For the past two semesters I have been working with Greg Riestenberg, a graduate student in Pratt’s Communications Design program, to come up … Continue reading
Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First “examples” matrices
UPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. To complement the “conceptual” images we created to depict the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Hawk-Dove, and Stag Hunt games, Greg Riestenberg and I have been … Continue reading
Posted in Evolutionary Games Infographics, Game Theory, Information Design
Tagged Greg Riestenberg
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Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield’s “SuperCooperators”
Martin Nowak has accomplished a lot for a mid-career scientist. His theoretical work exploring how cooperation evolves has illuminated the importance of a great number of evolutionary mechanisms. He has also been unafraid to tackle real-life problems of cooperation, including … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Books, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Group Selection, History, Human Evolution, Human Nature, Kin Selection, Language Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Punishment, Reciprocity, Religion, Superorganisms, Sustainability
Tagged David Sloan Wilson, Edward O. Wilson, Garrett Hardin, JBS Haldane, John Maynard Smith, Martin A. Nowak, Roger Highfield, Supercooperators, William D. Hamilton
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Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images
UPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. This post described earlier versions of our “conceptual” evolutionary games infographics for the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Stag Hunt, and Hawk-Dove games. The latest versions of … Continue reading
Posted in Evolutionary Games Infographics, Game Theory, Information Design, Teaching Tools
Tagged Greg Riestenberg, Hawk-Dove game, Prisoner's Dilemma, Stag Hunt game
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