#nash equilibrium

[lamiue]

Having an exam about Nash Equilibrium on the day Bobby Nash died wasn't on my 2025 bingo card

[thestrandatloughbeg]

Nash equilibrium? Nah, I prefer M*A*S*H equilibrium (there is never enough M*A*S*H)

[nofatclips]

How to outsmart the Prisoner’s Dilemma - Lesson by Lucas Husted, directed by Ivana Bošnjack and Thomas Johnson.

[kenyatta]

Navigation Apps Changed the Politics of Traffic

Are navigation apps creating more problems than they’re solving?

Everyone wants to feel in control. In L.A., nothing concerns locals more than traffic—not personal safety, the cost of living, or even the housing market—according to a 2016 poll by the Los Angeles Times. Drivers there spend an average of 80 hours in gridlock every year, according to a report by Texas A&M University. That’s a full three-and-a-half days.

So virtually everyone is following a routing app, in L.A. and beyond. A 2015 Pew survey found that 90 percent of Americans who own smartphones get their driving directions from them, at least some of the time. Our troubled psyches are soothed by the constant movement the apps encourage us to be in. By isolating the source of jams in closures and crashes, the apps teach us why congestion even exists, a question that can be as aggravating as the thing itself. “Why is traffic slow? How can I get around it? Waze tells me,” the columnist Gary Richards wrote in the Mercury News in 2016. Brian Roberts, a writer and producer who authored a book about L.A. street shortcuts in the 1980s, declared in a 2015 L.A. Times op-ed that Waze feels like a “a quantum leap forward for those of us who want to keep our blood pressure down during the daily commute.”

But researchers have known for decades that driver-first traffic “fixes,” even with the best of intentions, have deleterious effects on transportation networks overall. The principle of “induced demand” is one expression of this. When engineers widen roads in order to accommodate growing traffic volumes, the outcome in the long run will rarely be a faster journey for drivers. That’s because “the traffic we see does not represent the full demand for peak travel at the prevailing cost, since congestion itself causes many potential rush-hour trips to be canceled, diverted, or rescheduled,” the urban economists Richard Arnott and Kenneth Small wrote in a 1994 issue of American Scientist. Like liquid, traffic expands to the space available.

[jennywritespdx]

By Jenny Westberg

John Forbes Nash, Jr., a mathematician who rode the line between genius and madness all the way to a Nobel Prize, died in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike at the age of 86, along with his wife, Alicia, 82.

Nash developed a theory of non-cooperative games known as the “Nash equilibrium.” Published in 1950, the deceptively simple theory became a tool of staggering significance, with applications in fields ranging from economics to evolutionary biology.

“To some extent, sanity is a form of conformity,” he said. “People are always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering. But it’s really not so simple. I think madness can be an escape, also” – one he admitted he sometimes missed. “Rational thought imposes a limit on one’s relationship to the cosmos,” he explained.

Nash was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Science, an award he shared with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.

John Forbes Nash, Jr. was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but he went on to recover. By the time he received the Nobel Prize, he had completely stopped taking medications.

CAUTION: If you have been prescribed medications for mental illness or any other condition, ask your doctor if that medication is right for you. Don't take random meds or street drugs. You didn't write the equilibrium theory.

Nash’s rise in his field, his struggles with mental illness, and his reemergence as a respected scholar were chronicled in Ron Howard’s Oscar-winning 2002 film A Beautiful Mind.

Rising star

Born on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, Nash was recognizable early on as a prodigy. Sylvia Nasar, wrote in 1994, “He read constantly. He played chess. He whistled entire Bach melodies.”

Nash attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) on a full scholarship. Initially he majored in chemical engineering, but switched to mathematics.

He received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in 1948, and accepted a scholarship to Princeton University to pursue his doctorate.

His former CIT professor Richard Duffin wrote Nash a letter of recommendation consisting of one sentence: "This man is a genius."

The taxi driver, identified as Tarek Girgis, was flown to a New Brunswick hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. No charges were filed immediately.

After learning of the fatal car crash, Russell Crowe, who portrayed Nash in the movie, posted on Twitter, “An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.”

The article "Beautiful Minds, Beautiful Hearts," by Jenny Westberg, is ©Jenny Westberg, ©Oregon Archive. No reuse without permission.

@jennywritesworld @jennywritespdx 3/30/26

[orenstern]

Nash Equilibrium suggest the most likely Event and Outcome of Procreation is that every woman immaculately conceives and every child is an Annointed One.

[mymoneymatters]

University: Yale

Course: Game Theory

EP 4: Best Responses in Soccer and Business Partnerships

Lecturer: Ben Polak

[mymoneymatters]

University: Yale

Course: Game Theory

EP 3: Iterative Deletion and Median Voter Theorem

Lecturer: Ben Polak