How random tweaks in timing can lead to new game theory strategies

Most game theory models don’t reflect the relentlessly random timing of the real world. In a new paper, Justin Grana, James Bono, and SFI Professor David Wolpert model what happens when players receive information or act at random times, which could make a big difference in decision-making.

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Archaeology of the People

The July issue of Knowable Magazine published an interview with Jeremy Sabloff, External Professor Emeritus of SFI and past President of the Institute (2009-2015), about his work on “the archaeology of common folk,” which is reviewed in the 2019 Annual Review of Anthropology.

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Jeremy Van Cleve receives NSF CAREER award

Former SFI Postdoc Jeremy Van Cleve, now an assistant professor of biology at the University of Kentucky, has received a CAREER award for early career faculty from the National Science Foundation.

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A new normal: Study explains universal pattern in fossil record

Instead of the typical bell-shaped curve, the fossil record shows a fat-tailed distribution, with extreme, outlier, events occurring with higher-than-expected probability. Using the same mathematical tools that describe stock market crashes, SFI researchers explain the evolutionary dynamics behind this universal pattern in the fossil record and uncover "a new normal."

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Aeon: Life ≠ alive

In their essay for Aeon, External Professor Sara Walker and Professor Michael Lachmann argue that we would do well to understand life as a process of transmitting information.

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GWCSS at 25: The ‘best department in the world’

This summer marks the 25th anniversary of SFI’s Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science and Complexity. To learn what makes this annual event so special — and how it has evolved over a quarter century and more than 275 participants — we sat down with co-directors and founders John Miller and Scott Page.

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Aeon: How do you teach a car that a snowman won’t walk across the road?

How do you get an artificial intelligence to become more trustworthy? You teach it to think like a baby. The question and answer might read like a joke. Yet, as SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell explains in an essay for Aeon, teaching AI systems to think more like babies is one of the strategies that scientists are starting to deploy to create better AI.

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In memoriam: Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate who revealed symmetry and order in the world of subatomic particles and leveled his genius at complex mysteries of life and mind, died peacefully May 24, 2019. He was 89 years old.

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