Algorithmic Game Theory Blog

https://agtb.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/automatic-proof-for-reimanns-hyp… Love this one as a look into the future.

oh boy, glad to see those thoughts are on HN, but it barely scratched the surface of the problem. It's a special topic of interest for me, as I'm currently trying to reform sports in my country (figure skating in particular) and involved with number of projects (software and hardware) for sports. The main point I want to praise this article for is that sport should be designed. Most sport are not, they just emerged from free play activities and for the last 70+ years are mostly being changed reactively as a response to professionalization, tragic events and TV requirements (as TV rights are the major source of revenue for many international federations). There is no book or theory on how to design the sport. How to choose tradeoffs to satisfy different stakeholders. The closest thing I could find is actually body of knowledge from computer game designers – how to keep users engaged, how to ensure the incentive structure is aligned, how to fit into requirements of the game/tournaments etc. Because of this I suspect eSports will outperform many traditional sports soon in terms of member base by a lot. In traditional sport if you want to know how a smallest change in rules will alter the whole game – you out of luck. The only way is just to push hard for the change and watch. Here is a great read about cascading changes in hockey provoked by tiny changes of the equipment regulations. [1] Or how suboptimal incentive structure in Badminton tournament resulted in weird…

"Is Game Theory Useful?" (2012) [0] [0] https://agtb.wordpress.com/2012/06/17/is-game-theory-useful/

There is a point of view that says that computer science conferences exist for the purpose of gaming the tenure system. The name of the game is plausible deniability: you're not supposed to submit papers that contain known false claims, but everything else is fair game. And this has become such an integral part of the culture that technical correctness is no longer a necessary condition for accepting a paper [1]. I think in this light it's quite clear why many scientists are happy to leave their papers hidden behind the ACM paywall. [1] http://agtb.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/should-technical-errors-disqualif…

Well, sorting is not so very difficult that you can improve it by much. However it is true for linear programming: http://agtb.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/progress-in-algorithms-beats-moor…