The world of game theory is currently on fire. In May, Freeman Dyson at Princeton University and William Press at the University of Texas announced that they had discovered a previously unknown strategy for the game of prisoner's dilemma which guarantees one player a better outcome than the other.
That's a monumental surprise. Theorists have studied Prisoner's Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more.
Luís F. Simões on 15 Nov 10in related news: Twitter Mood Predicts The Stock Market "An analysis of almost 10 million tweets from 2008 shows how they can be used to predict stock market movements up to 6 days in advance" http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25900/ http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003
Francesco Biscani on 16 Nov 10Likewise, I can predict the statistical properties of white noise :-)
nikolas smyrlakis on 18 Nov 10the problem is that usually the google search queries and the twitter updates happen after a crisis for example. I dont really think that people all over the world suddenly realised that Lehman would collapse and started googling it like crazy before it collapsed. More likely they did it afterwards.
