Introduction Social influence is everywhere in our society and whether we want to admit or not, the way information is presented to us has a great influence on how we perceive a person, a product, or the world. The politician who wants our vote, the salesman who wants us to buy their products, social media […]
Introduction Have you visited a McDonald’s and noticed there is Burger King (or some other fast food restaurant) right across from it? Why is this the case? Why do we often see similar establishments in groups? Note that this does not only happen with fast food chains. We also see this happen with gas stations […]
Usefulness of Game Theory Game Theory is a concept that allows you to clearly evaluate how your opponent may respond to your actions, and the outcome of these set of actions. Based on these evaluations, you would choose an action you would believe that best benefits you, based on how you think your opponent behaves. […]
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Do Echo Chambers Exist in Facebook?
Introduction Social media is a powerful tool that allows users to easily interact with each other, share and create content, provide information, and much more. However, it can just as easily be used negatively. One such way is through the formation of echo chambers; staying within communities that only provide information that you want to […]
In lecture 6 we learned about Power Laws and two characteristics of this type of distribution caught my attention. The first one is that Power-Laws can be found almost everywhere and the second is the rich get richer concept. As a big tennis fan, I decided to check if both these concepts could be found […]
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Game Theory in Among Us
Introduction Among Us is one of the most popular games, especially during the entire pandemic. The game takes place on a spaceship where each player is told at the beginning if they are the imposter or not. There are more cremates than imposters. The imposter’s job is to kill all the cremates. The crewmates job […]
Introduction: From becoming viral from a single post to spreading news from one end of the globe to the other, information cascades play a vital role in today’s society. Most of the time, the effects are harmless, like a viral TikTok of a UTSC student bringing in an air mattress and sleeping on campus, but […]
Insight Asking favors to friends is very common and we genuinely expect them to cooperate and say yes without following up with a number of questions. However, in the odd case the answer is a no, we’d like them to first ask us questions in order to soften the no with reasons. Although this seems […]
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Game Theory and Crypto
In this class, a major and applicable concept we learned was Game Theory. Tying it to something that is quite relevant in today’s society would be Crypto. But how do these two topics collide? The fact that the Bitcoin blockchain was designed in a way that enforced a Nash Equilibrium by default. An actor of […]
Introduction There are many languages out there in the world. Each language has their own set of grammar that sets them apart from one another. Often when we learn a new language , depending on what we learn the ease of learning is easier or harder. Often times English is denoted as a difficult language […]
Introduction Critical Infrastructure (CI) are physical and organizational structures and facilities (i.e., building, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise and one’s failure can cause other cascading failures (IEEE, 2022). There have been many cases of critical infrastructure failure (i.e., Hurricane Sandy in 2012 causing enormous power utility damage leading […]
It’s race day at the track and field championship and you’ve finished warming up for your 10km race event taking place in 10 minutes. You suddenly remember that you’ve forgotten to decide on a racing strategy! Should you conserve energy in the first half then sprint the remaining laps, or set a fast and consistent […]
Introduction To middle-school students and their parents, the high-school admissions process is a gruelling and universally loathed rite of passage. But as awful as it can be, it used to be much worse[1]. Tens of thousands of students, for instance, were transferred to schools in the late 1990s that looked to have nothing to offer […]
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PageRank in Google Bombing
1. Introduction In the first question of assignment 3, we had an opportunity to derive multiple formulas and learn the process of spam farm. It doesn’t look really hard to implement in real life, so you may have wondered how we could apply it in practice, or if there are any real-world applications for it. […]
Introduction In any city, there is always a continuous effort to try and find ways to make better use of the land within the city. In some scenarios, the existing land usage might be inefficient and so developers will want to redevelop the area to fix these inefficiencies. In these cases, they may sometimes run […]
The idea of six degrees of separation as learned is class says that everyone in the world is just six people or fewer away from you through your connections. This is a pretty crazy fact since in a world of 8 billion people you would think six is an extremely small number to be able […]
Introduction Game theory is a popular topic. A lot of my peers personally love playing games: video games, board games and (especially) mind games. As computer science students, we have been trained for most of our university days to optimize; and game theory allows us to adopt tools to optimize the strategy formulated in games. […]
Motivation With game theory bleeding into so many facets, it could still be hard to imagine how game theory would have any connection with fisheries. The paper I have come across highlights how game theory can be applied to better understand overfishing between different fisheries, which in turn could prevent disasters such as climate change. […]
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Game theory in poker introduction
When it comes to examples of zero sum games poker is one of the most commonly played zero sum games in the west. It would be infeasible to try and cover game theory for any state in poker so we will look at a heads up game of poker with 1 player having the most […]
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Playing Games with Mitochondria
Introduction In lecture, we learned about some of the fundamentals of game theory and a few of its applications. Having such a narrowed-view of the applications of game theory, it is fascinating to see the different ways in which game theoretic notions apply themselves in different fields of research. The article I have chosen takes […]
Cyber security can be viewed as a non-zero sum game between an attacker and a defender. The attacker tries to find the most destructive adversarial strategies while the defender tries to find the most stable defence strategies. Nisioti et al. (2021) conduct a research on game-theroretic decision support for optimising cyber forensic investigations. In the […]
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Game Theory in Online Shopping
Motivation No doubt that everyone has the experience of shopping online nowadays, especially during the pandemic. There are nearly 2 million small and medium businesses worldwide selling on Amazon and over 4,000 items sold on Amazon per minute on average. However, although online shopping has brought a lot of convenience to our lives, it is […]
Clearly, water is one of the most crucial components to everyone’s existence on Earth. However over two billion people live in countries where water supply is inadequate, and approximately every 1 in 4 children will be in areas of extremely high water stress by 2040 (Unicef). As a result, in prevention and mitigation of a […]
Introduction As we have seen in class, prisoner dilemmas present a situation were working in ones own self-interest appears to be the safer option, but can result in an even worse payoff if both players are using the same rational. However, will players act selfishly when apart of some larger organization, that enforces collaboration for […]
Introduction Recently, when I review my peers’ posts, I found an interesting post about the B07 term test which I also took this test. Since I cannot find my previous test paper, so I will reuse Minqi’s diagram in his post here. The details of the bonus question are listed below. Analysis From the above […]
Okay, maybe the title is a little clickbait. But I assure you it’s for good reason. University is a big part of our lives (or at least mine), not only do we choose to study here for four or more years, but we also – whether cognitively or not – choose which University. There are […]
Currently, social deduction games have been popular among a lot of people, especially during the pandemic period. People find it enjoyable during the process of using logic and reasoning to uncover other players’ roles and meanwhile, can use communication and other means of bluffing to hide their own identities. Some good examples of such games […]
When we discussed Prisoner’s Dilemma in the lecture, it reminds me of a midterm test that I took for CSCB07 a few years ago. On the midterm test, there was a bonus question asking students to select from 3 options: 1) receive 7 bonus marks, 2) receive 10 bonus marks, and 3) receive 30 bonus […]
As an avid makeup lover and user, I’ve grown to genuinely fear a product I like to use going viral on TikTok. At this point, I can name a dozen makeup products that went viral on TikTok that consequently became sold out at every store for months to whole YEARS. Before TikTok exploded in popularity, […]
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Game Theory in Relationships
Motivation Everyone has some relationship with other people, whether it be with family members, friends, or a romantic partner. We would have some interactions with them that would either improve the relationship or break it altogether. How do we know what to do in order to have the best outcome for ourselves? Is there a […]