Month: March 2007

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The Physics of "All-In"?

Combining two excellent topics, physics and poker, physics/0703122:

Universal statistical properties of poker tournaments
Authors: Clément Sire
We present a simple model of Texas hold’em poker tournaments which contains the two main aspects of the game: i. the minimal bet is the blind, which grows exponentially with time; ii. players have a finite probability to go “all-in”, hence betting all their chips. The distribution of the number of chips of players not yet eliminated (measured in units of its average) is found to be independent of time during most of the tournament, and reproduces accurately Internet poker tournaments data. This model makes the connection between poker tournaments and the persistence problem widely studied in physics, as well as some recent physical models of biological evolution or competing agents, and extreme value statistics which arises in many physical contexts.

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The Computer Recommends….

Scirate.com now has a simple recommending engine. Right now it’s very basic, but I hope to improve it and make it a little more interesting in the future.

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Skepticism….Check. Axes….Ummm…

Bah (posted without long line of four letter words I would really like to print but am forced, by my good nature and good upbringing, to avoid printing on this family friendly blog.):

“Businesses aren’t too fascinated about the details of quantum mechanics, but academics have their own axes to grind. I can assure you that our VCs look at us a lot closer than the government looks at the academics who win research grants,” Martin said.

Note to D-wave. We aren’t skeptical that you built a device. We are skeptical that your path forward will ever work (some more skpetical than others…me I’m an optimist!) and we are even more skeptical of your statements trying to sell quantum devices by advertising unsubstantiated computational power. I also know VCs who looked closely at your company and said something very similar to what those lazy no good bum academics are saying.

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America COMPETES

New legislation designed to help foster science, innovation, and education: the America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) Act. Proposes, among other things, the doubling of NSF/DoE Office of Science budgets in four years.

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Mock Theta Functions?

Any mathematician care to comment on this press coverage of a recent preprint on Mock Theta Functions? Oh, right I scared away all the mathematicians when I urged computer scientists and physicists to join in war against the evil mathematicians (a war since expanded to include evil biologists. 😉 )