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Ganzfried Gleans

Final Jeopardy Wagering Part 2

I previously posted several about an interesting final jeopardy wagering situation that arose in the final game of James Holzhauer’s big winning streak in 2019. Last night another interesting scenario arose in the final game of the Jeopardy Masters series. You can watch the…

Evaluating randomized algorithms on randomized problem instances

Suppose we want to compare the performances of two algorithms — call them A and B — on a problem X. In particular, suppose that we want to evaluate the algorithms on random instances of X drawn from some distribution D…

Optimal crime sentencing

I have been watching some true crime videos recently, and a phenomenon that seems relatively common is that the criminal sets out to commit one crime, which ends up turning into a much more serious one. For example, in one video I saw the other day a couple kidnapped a woman hoping to…

Basic game theory fact that many people get wrong

Consider an imperfect-information extensive-form game, such as poker. We know that every such game has at least one Nash equilibrium, by Nash’s existence theorem. (Technically Nash’s theorem applies just to perfect-information normal-form…

Academia did everything possible to prevent discovery of COVID vaccines

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were discovered as a result of research done by Dr. Katalin Kariko. While obviously we can not be sure yet about the long-term effects of the vaccines, their development is…

Who’s the weakest link?

In the Weakest Link game show, eight contestants answer a series of trivia questions to accumulate a “bank” of money, with one contestant (the “weakest link”) voted off at each round. When there are 2 contestants remaining, they face off for a series of 5 questions each, with the winner…

The AI conference system is flawed

It is widely known that there is a lot of “random noise” in AI conference paper acceptances. For example, an experiment was done at the conference NIPS several years ago showing that paper acceptances were much closer to random chance than initially expected. In that…

Funding in startups vs. academia

Funding plays a critical role both for starting a company and for running an academic research lab at a university. In the first case, it makes perfect sense. The startup founders do not have enough money themselves for the resources needed to start the company, so they…

Largest unique number game

Recently the following game was proposed on twitter:

5 poker players go to house in WSOP. There is one master unbelievable room everybody wants. To determine who gets the room everybody writes a number 1–10. Whoever writes the highest UNIQUE number gets…

(Desk) rejected!!!

The conference NeurIPS instituted a new reviewing policy this year:

“In order to cope with the growing number of submissions, this year we will adopt an “early desk-reject” process involving only Area Chairs and Senior Area Chairs. Area Chairs will be responsible for…

I realized there had to be a better way

You may recall the origin of the holiday Festivus in Seinfeld, as described by Frank Costanza:

FRANK: Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reach for the last one they had — but so did another man. As I rained blows…

Who will solve P vs. NP?

The P vs. NP problem has been singled out as one of the most challenging open problems in mathematics/computer science, and carries a $1M prize for the first correct solution. It is considered by many to be the single most important open problem in computer science. It was first…

Academic AI game theory

There has recently been a lot of attention for AI game theory — the branch focused on large-scale imperfect-information game solving in particular — in part due to success of poker AI agents such as Libratus and Pluribus in defeating top human players. Many outlets have referred to…

Optimal Final Jeopardy wagering

On the 6/3/19 episode of Jeopardy, which ended up being James Holzhauer’s final episode, the following scenario arose for Final Jeopardy. The scores were $11,000 for Jay, $23,400 for James, and $26,600 for Emma, with final jeopardy category “Shakespeare’s Time.”

Thesis proposal

I wrote my PhD thesis proposal in September 2013, around 20 months before I ended up graduating. The title is the same as my dissertation title, “Computing Strong Game-Theoretic Strategies and Exploiting Suboptimal Opponents in Large Games.” The document as well as my final dissertation and…

Most important open problems in computational game theory

There has been recent success in creating strong algorithm agents for large two-player zero-sum games (e.g., for computer poker). However…

3-player Kuhn poker project

In my first post https://medium.com/ganzfried-gleans/how-undergraduate-ai-should-be-taught-85c9827719b I described my new undergraduate class on artificial intelligence (AI) that I recently taught at Florida International University and how it compared to classes taught at other…

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