small update

[nibot]

blah — trying to hack out my last remaining personal statements for graduate applications. I've decided that the ease of writing a personal statement for a given graduate school is a good measure of the appropriateness of that grad school program — if it's obvious that a program is a good match, it's easy to write a convincing application! I've written to a lot of people at various departments, and received some odd replies. Maybe I'll post some sometime.

I've been reading Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone. I picked it up in paperback at Moe's because of an odd confluence of game theory encounters, such as reading Ellsberg's book and a few random other events (somehow Rand corp comes to mind again); having watched A Beautiful Mind last night, the Game Theory references continue. I used to love popular science books like this one, but now they just sound too dumbed-down. I looked up von Neumann's original monograph (QA269.V65) so maybe I'll take a look at that. Anyways, it's been kind of fun to read a little bit more about game theory, since I've long puzzled over the situation where you can infinitely second-guess someone (that scene in The Princess Bride comes to mind), and I'm also interested in the application of game theory to coding (of information — think Shannon and friends), since in that case, your strategy is an implicit form of communication. Another source of wondering is the 'perfectly rational opponent' hypothesis — in the real world, it's rarely economical to play completely rationally, because research costs money. Lo and behold, there's a review of a monograph on that subject in the current AMS Bulletin: ``Computation and complexity in economic behavior and organization,'' by K. Mount and S. Reiter. The authors attempt an examination of the computation-theoretic cost of rationality, but their book receives lukewarm review.

Funny quote from KALX that pertains to Emperor Norton in a small way: ``The city of Colma is the only city in the United States where the dead outnumber the living — it has that many cemetaries. It's also a very bad place to be if zombies turn out to be real!''

I saw that someone listed themselves as being interested in "applied procrastination." haha! So far in my procrastination, I have applied to be a CSUA mentor, applied for a summer research program at Argonne National Laboratory (in Chicago, with the unfortunate acronym ANL), and read about game theory.

Now back to my grad school apps for Physics. hmm.

Comments

[squarkz.livejournal.com]

I've decided that the ease of writing a personal statement for a given graduate school is a good measure of the appropriateness of that grad school program — if it's obvious that a program is a good match, it's easy to write a convincing application!

it's funny you should say that -- i found exactly the same thing!