Posts

  • Getting your first lectureship

    On Wednesday I was invited to participate in a Webinar entitled “Getting your first lecturship”. This was organised by Cardiff University’s graduate college (UGC). The format included an overview of recent findings from a survey conducted by the Association of Careers Advisory Services and then a discussion including Dr Sophie Coulombeau and Dr Claire Shaw.

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  • A Summer of game theory software development

    This Summer has seen 3 undergraduates carry out 8 week placements with me developing further game theoretic code in Sagemath:

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  • Picking a good Vainglory jungler with game theory and sagemath

    I’ve recently been playing a really cool video game: Vainglory. This is described as a MOBA which I must admit I had never heard off until this year when my students mentioned it to me, but basically it’s an online multi player game in which players form two teams of 6 heroes and fight each other. The choice of the heroes is very important as the composition of a team can make or break a match. This seems to have a bit of a cult following (so no doubt just like for my post about clash of clans I might annoy people again) and there is a great wiki that gives guides for the play of each player. In this post I’ll describe using Python to scrape that wiki to get data that feeds in to a game theoretic model which I then analyse using Sagemath to give some insight about the choice of hero.

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  • Natural language processing of new jokes from 2015

    This is a brief update to a previous post: “Python, natural language processing and predicting funny”. In that post I carried out some basic natural language processing with Python to predict whether or not a joke is funny. In this post I just update that with some more data from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe festival.

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  • Why I am a paying member of cloud.sagemath

    If you are not familiar with Sagemath it is a free open source mathematics package that does simple things like expand algebraic expressions as well as far more complex things (optimisation, graph theory, combinatorics, game theory etc…). Cloud.sagemath is a truly amazing tool not just for Sage bu for scientific computation in general and it’s free. Completely 100% free. In this post I’ll explain why I pay for it.

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