Game Theory
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist who is making a big name for himself using game theory, a branch of applied mathematics, to make shockingly accurate predictions.
A Math Trek story in Science News tells the story of one such prediction:
One of his most famous past predictions also concerned Iran. In 1984, the model predicted that when Ayatollah Khomeini died, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khameini and a little-known cleric named Hasheimi Rafsanjani would rise to succeed Khomeini as leaders of Iran. At the time, most experts considered that outcome exceedingly unlikely, since Khomeini had designated a different person as his successor. But in fact, when Khomeini died five years later, Rafsanjani and Khameini succeeded him.
GOOD Magazine calls him The New Nostradamus:
The criticism rankles him, because, to his mind, the proof is right there on the page. “I’ve published a lot of forecasting papers over the years,” he says. “Papers that are about things that had not yet happened when the paper was published but would happen within some reasonable amount of time. There’s a track record that I can point to.” And indeed there is. Bueno de Mesquita has made a slew of uncannily accurate predictions—more than 2,000, on subjects ranging from the terrorist threat to America to the peace process in Northern Ireland—that would seem to prove him right.
This kind of thing really excites me. As a computer programmer and a mathematics buff, game theory really stokes my fire. I first learned about game theory while reading the The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins described how game theory could be used to reveal evolutionarily stable strategies — the real-world manifestation of natural selection.
Upon learning about game theory, I immediately recognized its potential predictive power. I was excited again recently, when a colleague emailed me a link to this essay by Rob Brown where he describes how he used a very simple implementation of game theory to create a movie recommendation system that was more accurate than that used by Netflix!
Yeah. Game theory is good stuff.
Tags: science, technology