go-playing AI
Back when I was a student I was a fairly enthusiastic Go player, and always liked the fact that it seemed to be resistant to efforts to make a strong go-playing computer program. (At any rate, it...
View ArticleBristol Algorithms Days
A quick note of thanks to the organisers of Bristol Algorithms Days, a 2-day workshop (just ended) featuring talks on ongoing work on algorithms and proof techniques for analysing their properties....
View ArticleNotes on the EU referendum
The June 2016 issue of the Oxfordshire Observer, a newsletter from the local Liberal Democrats, had the headline “Remain for prosperity”, and from the article: “Thousands of jobs in the county have...
View ArticleNote on the EU referendum, ex post
The EU referendum has been interpreted as showing a nation divided by age (older people more likely to have voted Brexit), or possibly affluence, or alternatively geography (as in: Scotland and London...
View ArticleGraduate wage premium
I liked the Guardian article ‘Value for money’ can’t be the only measure of university, one reason being that it calls attention to Michael Oakshott’s 1950 essay The Idea of a University, which I now...
View ArticleEATCS Fellows 2017 - Call for Nominations
The official call for nominations is at this URL at the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), below is a copy:Deadline: December 31, 2016VERY IMPORTANT: all nominees and...
View ArticleSAGT 2017 deadline extended to 5th May
The PC chairs asked me to advertise that the submission deadline for the 2017 symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory is now the 5th of May.
View ArticleBrexit and Rubinstein’s bargaining model
A Google search for Brexit and game theory finds a number of web pages that discuss models of the negotiation process, constructing payoff matrices in which the parties to the negotiation choose to...
View Articlenew idea for TEF
The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) attempts to measure teaching quality by looking at a collection of metrics obtained from universities, and universities recently received (provisional)...
View ArticleWINE 2017 : Conference on Web and Internet Economics
A reminder about the 13th WINE conference:Link to conference web site Link to Call for Papers (deadline is 2nd August 2017) Over the past decade, research in theoretical computer science, artificial...
View ArticleJOB: Associate Professorship of Algorithms and Complexity Theory, Oxford
Associate Professorship of Algorithms and Complexity Theory with Tutorial Fellowship at Hertford College UNIVERSITY of OXFORDhttp://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/news/1383-full.html Applications are invited for the...
View Article2018 Alan Turing Institute Doctoral Studentships
Doctoral research in data science: studentships to begin in autumn 2018. The application deadline is midday on 30 November 2017.Here is a link to the full advertisement, with details about what the...
View Articlethinking algebraically or geometrically
I was recently talking with an historian who mentioned to me that when Stephen Hawking lost the use of his hands (so could no longer write on a whiteboard), he had to switch from thinking...
View ArticleSAGT and WINE 2018
New web sites for conferences later this year in Algorithmic Game Theory:11th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT) Beijing, China, from the 11th to the 13th of September 2018.14th...
View ArticleSTOC child care
I received a request to call attention to the following, but will refrain from sharing it with the Theory of Computing blog aggregator since others have already done so (for example here). In a...
View ArticleWhat do you know that deserves more publicity?
I was talking with a journalist yesterday - not an interview, just an informal conversation - and he asked me the question: What stories in Computer Science are not getting enough attention? And my...
View ArticleThe will of the people
At one point in Iain Banks’ novel The Wasp Factory, the main character (a troubled teenager called Frank) makes the following observation: Often I’ve thought of myself as a state; a country or, at the...
View ArticleMeaningful votes
In the unlikely event that we get a second referendum on Brexit, here’s how it ought to be done: Arrange all the alternatives in a line in order of “hardness” of Brexit. In may be felt that Remain...
View ArticleNew conference: ACM-SIAM Algorithmic Principles of Computer Systems (APoCS20)
ACM-SIAM Algorithmic Principles of Computer Systems (APoCS20)https://www.siam.org/Conferences/CM/Main/apocs20 January 8, 2020 Hilton Salt Lake City Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA Colocated with...
View ArticleAugar review
This note considers the Augar review from the perspective of a prospective student, as opposed to a typical university (Wonkhe does not fill me with enthusiasm on that aspect).Moneysavingexpert gives...
View Articleplans for WINE conferences
Update on the annual Conference on Web and Internet Economics (I am on the steering committee).WINE 2019 (the 15th) will be at Columbia University, December 10-12. We could not avoid the clash with...
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A competitive foraging/gathering game
Here’s an interesting-looking game that occurred to me recently; let me know if you have seen an analysis of it or something similar. Suppose that two or more competing agents can move around in an...
View ArticleOn leaving the EU
For someone based in the UK who works in any kind of international market, it looks reasonable to consider how his business strategy should be affected by leaving the EU. In the case of CS theory...
View ArticleShort-term prospects for UK universities
A round-up of gloomy reading material I have been taking in.UK universities fear huge budget holes as Chinese students stay home has worrying figures about the dependence of UK universities on...
View ArticleSurge pricing, anyone?
One social contribution that I tentatively attribute to Uber is popularisation of the concept of surge pricing. That is, we try to call an Uber and all-too-frequently get told that we have to pay a...
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