Registration form

An introduction to 
Complex Systems Science

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Date :           8-September 2003

Location :    CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra

 

The course will focus on Adaptive Game Theory.


 

 

Name

 

Position

 

CSIRO Division or Business Unit or Agency

 

Address

 

Email

 

Phone no.

 

IMPORTANT NOTE : 

The course is not intended for people who are already developing and applying these tools.It is not a meeting of experts in these CSS fields.It is designed to help you gain a basic understanding of a CSS research area and to provide you sources of information which you can further investigate if you think the approach is appropriate.

The number of places available is strictly limited. 

If the course is over-subscribed, places will be allocated to ensure a wide range of groups and agencies are represented.

Registration Forms should be sent by email to

By email paul.walker@csiro.au

 

Module 3: An introduction to complex systems science

Adaptive Game Theory

Workshop Notes

Each techniques will be accompanied by a set of notes describing :

·The theory behind the technique

·Why the method is useful

·Issues about data or types of relationships as they influence the choice of each method ?

·Key outputs and interpretation

·Judging the success of the method

·Tools for operationalising the method

·Types of problems that the method is relevant to and a description of at least 3 examples of how it has been used

What is Adaptive Game Theory?

A game is played between people (or animals, or institutions, or other agents) when the consequences of an action taken by one player depend on the actions of other players. Players must therefore adopt a strategy, which tells them what to do taking into account what they expect others to do.Game Theory has developed over the past fifty years as the study of such strategic interactions in socio-economic and other situations. Traditionally, economists have assumed that players in a game are capable of prodigious feats of reasoning to tell them how best to play, and that “best” means maximising some simple payoff measure such as money. Recently however, dissatisfaction with this approach has led to a shift of emphasis to dynamic questions about how agents learn to play games, given more realistic cognitive or other limitations, and whether and how factors such as social norms and conventions influence what it is that players try to maximise. For example, in biological systems, very cognitively limited organisms “learn” strategies through natural selection, and what they maximise is “fitness”. In adaptive, or evolutionary game theory, we are interested in modelling these more realistic assumptions and dynamic processes, and exploring their consequences in socio-economic and other settings.

Presenter

Robert Seymour is Professor of Mathematics at University College London, UK, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the ESRC Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution (ELSE) based in the Economics Department at UCL, as well as an Executive Member and PhD Program Director for the Centre for Mathematics and Physics in the Life Sciences and Experimental Biology (CoMPLEX) at UCL.His research interests cover a range of areas, including evolutionary game theory and socio-economic behaviour, genetic networks, cell-signalling networks related to immunological phenomena, ecological modelling, and systems biology – particularly related to liver function.