The Trading Agent Competition is a multiple auction-type game competition held every year. A trading agent is a computer program that tries to satisfy the preferences of its client(s) by attempting to assemble a variety of travel packets through different types of auctions and competitions. The agent who fulfills his client’s preferences best wins.
This creates […]

A recent paper by Ross Anderson and Tyler Moore, “The Economics of Information Security: A Survey and Open Questions,” brings together the seemingly disparate fields of security and economics to discuss the reasoning behind security decisions. They provide examples such as why individual PC owners choose to install anti-virus software and why large banks choose […]

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/Neural_Network_OCR.asp
(Note: Knowledge of C# / Java / C++ is recommended.) 
The beauty of neural networks is that they’re inherently generalized with respect to inputs and outputs.  Simply put, there is no type of neural network dedicated to one particular task.  While there are many implementations and algorithms that can be used to create a neural network, they can […]

I thought that I would supplement the game theory portion of this class with some ideas that I learned in Econ 367. In this class, we have had a brief introduction to game theory. We have covered Nash equilibria in pure and mixed strategies in various games, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Battle […]

Some of the links in this post are very cool graphs. Definitely worth checking out!
Summary: Given a graph, finding an important node can sometimes be very intuitive. For example, finding a ‘bridge’ between two separate social groups might be very obvious if the graph is drawn properly. However, converting a set of […]

Game theory has been applied to many abstract networks in the course, from trading networks to social networks. One example that merits further investigation is a wireless ad hoc network.
Wireless ad hoc networks can easily be understood with the concepts presented in this class. Computers are nodes in the network and wireless radio links are […]

http://www.math.wisc.edu/~swanson/instructional/game_theory.pdf
 In this paper, the author discusses the optimal bluffing strategies for players in a simplified version of poker.  We say that player A bluffs if he bets in a hand where he is certain to have the worst hand, i.e the only way he can win the hand is by forcing the other player to […]

Internet traffic is as succeptible to Braess’ paradox as is vehicle traffic. Kagan Tumer and David H. Wolpert at NASA Ames Research Center present an improvement to greedy internet traffic routing algorithms in their paper “Avoiding Braess’ Paradox through Collective Intelligence”.
We have talked about how imposing rules from outside the system can help improve […]

http://mathforum.org/isaac/problems/bridges1.html
I wanted my first blog posting to get back to the roots of graph theory because the mathematics behind graphs and the number theory behind the mathematics is what fascinates me the most.  “The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg” and Euler numbers are one of the base principles when studying the math and number theory behind […]

Note: This was also posted on my own blog: http://aysz88.livejournal.com/27137.html . It may look better there.
In the February 16, 2007 issue of Science, Brendan J. Frey and Delbert Dueck apply “message-passing” networks to a problem that doesn’t seem particularly natural in that context: how does one cluster large numbers of objects, and then find […]