Hume Seminar Series: Game Theory
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Date: Tuesday, Febraury 28, 2023
Time: 6:00pm
Location: Virtual via Zoom; Link provided upon registration.
Open to students, faculty, and alumni from Virginia Tech and all other IC CAE institutions and CCI affiliations.
About the Event
This talk starts with game theory basics – what games are, how they are represented, and game attributes such as Nash equilibria. We’ll discuss what it means to say there are 78 distinct strict 2x2 ordinal games and some of the 78 will be reviewed including “prisoner’s dilemma” and “battle of the sexes”. The effects of playing games badly (e.g., playing the wrong game) and non-rationally (“the 2/3 game”) will be addressed. A winning strategy for the rock-paper-scissors game will be presented. Finally, unexpected game play is covered, with “surprise” categories described. There are national security implications for several of the topics.
About the Speaker
Dan Zwillinger
Dan Zwillinger has more than thirty years’ experience in solving technical and business problems in engineering and the physical sciences in large and small companies, government labs, consulting, and academia. He has worked in many technical disciplines including crystallography, radar, sonar, and communications. He enjoys educating and mentoring others; he was a college professor at RPI and in 2018 and 2019 he mentored an RPI senior capstone project. Dan started two companies. The first, started with Phase II SBIR funding was on electro-optic circuit board diagnostics; it failed after disappointing technical results. The second was on liquor manufacturing; it failed after the founders were distracted by other activities. Dan has a BS in mathematics from MIT, a PhD in applied mathematics from Caltech, and is a certified Six Sigma black belt (a continuous process improvement methodology). At Raytheon, Dan mentored dozens of six sigma projects; his own projects saved the company $42M. Dan published six reference books in mathematics and he is the editor of an applied mathematics book series. He obtained a drone patent he sold to Uber.
If you are an individual with a disability and desire an accommodation, please contact Sarah Downer at humecenter@vt.edu during regular business hours at least 10 business days prior to the event.