Algorithms, games, and evolution

Algorithms, games, and evolution.

Even the most seasoned students of evolution, starting with Darwin himself, have occasionally expressed amazement that the mechanism of natural selection has produced the whole of Life as we see it around us. There is a computational way to articulate the same amazement: "What algorithm could possibly achieve all this in a mere three and a half billion years?" In this paper we propose an answer...

Games and Sequential Algorithms

Games, Evolution, and Society

Classical game theory has been conceived to model strategic situations in which individuals’ decision making depends on the actions chosen by others. The theory has been extremely successful in several economic, social and technological contexts. However, many empirical results tend to indicate that the explanatory power of the theory is not completely satisfactory. Here we describe how the evo...

Prediction Games and Arcing Algorithms

The theory behind the success of adaptive reweighting and combining algorithms (arcing) such as Adaboost (Freund & Schapire, 1996a, 1997) and others in reducing generalization error has not been well understood. By formulating prediction as a game where one player makes a selection from instances in the training set and the other a convex linear combination of predictors from a finite set, exis...

Parrondo Games and Quantum Algorithms

We pursue the possible connections between classical games and quantum computation. The Parrondo game is one in which a random combination of two losing games produces a winning game. We introduce novel realizations of this Parrondo effect in which the player can ‘win’ via random reflections and rotations of the state-vector, and connect these to known quantum algorithms. [email protected]...