Posts
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Dec 15, 2015
The Dilemma of giving Christmas Gifts
This post gives a game theoretic explanation as to why we exchange gifts. On twitter @alexip tweeted “‘Let’s agree not to give each other presents for Christmas’ is just another case of the prisoner’s dilemma #gametheory”. This post builds on that and investigates the premise fully in an evolutionary context investigating different values of how good it feels to give and receive a gift :)
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Dec 5, 2015
I think this is how to crawl the history of a git repository
This blog post is a direct application of Cunningham’s Law: which is that “the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer”. With the other core developers of the Axelrod library we’re writing a paper and I wanted to see the evolution of a particular property of the library through the 2000+ commits (mainly to include a nice graph in the paper). This post will detail how I’ve cycled through all the commits and recorded the particular property I’m interested in. EDIT: thanks to Mario for the comments: see the edits in bold to see the what I didn’t quite get right.
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Nov 28, 2015
Survival of the fittest: Experimenting with a high performing strategy in other environments
A common misconception about evolution is that “The fittest organisms in a population are those that are strongest, healthiest, fastest, and/or largest.” However, as that link indicates, survival of the fittest is implied at the genetic level: and implies that evolution favours genes that are most able to continue in the next generation for a given environment. In this post, I’m going to take a look at a high performing strategy from the Iterated Prisoner’s dilemma that was obtained through an evolutionary algorithm. I want to see how well it does in other environments.
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Nov 15, 2015
Visualising Markov Chains with NetworkX
I’ve written quite a few blog posts about Markov chains (it occupies a central role in quite a lot of my research). In general I visualise 1 or 2 dimensional chains using Tikz (the LaTeX package) sometimes scripting the drawing of these using Python but in this post I’ll describe how to use the awesome networkx package to represent the chains.
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Oct 17, 2015
Getting in to reddit
In a previous post I wrote about the podcasts I listen to. I really need to update that as things have changed but this post is not the update. In this post I’ll discuss some of my early thoughts as I get in to reddit.
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