penny April 7th, 2007
Theoretical physicist Clement Sire is soon to publish his paper on poker tournaments, in particular the dynamics of the game Texas Hold ‘Em.
I first had a view of this game when I watched the World Series of Poker that Ajay was watching. It’s different from the classic poker game where all cards are held by players, since in Texas Hold ‘Em some cards are laid on the table.
Anyhow, back to Sire. Using intuition and clever statistics, he formulated a model that predicted the maximum stack (earnings) a leading player will hold as well as an estimate of how long a tournament will last. Both of these he says are functions of how many initial players there are and some behavioral aspects of players that he quantifies.
How cool is that?
What is also interesting is that organisers of these tournaments figured out that the minimum bets should be made to increase exponentially as the game progresses. Sire’s model explains this perfectly. Like he says, it is amazing intuition, even sans the math approach, that the organisers are able to figure this out. Fundamental observations pay off it looks like?
The techniques he uses are typical of analysis used in evolutionary dynamics used in biology.
Amazing.
=====Sydney Weather: Gloomy and Rainy====
Click to see San Diego casinos.
penny April 7th, 2007
Oi Bantay! =)
Well the context of this post is not entirely on the guard dog Pinoys usually have, but specifically for the toy dog-lovers. Tiny breeds as the minipinscher, toy poodle, pomeranian, terriers, etc.
Several articles yesterday, one of which was in yesterday’s LA Times , talked about how small dogs are now potentially useful in research about growth factors in humans that can eventually lead to insights about cancer and skeletal diseases. Isn’t that interesting?
Scientists found a particular piece of regulatory DNA that was present in all small dogs. It is an amazing find, and how this supposed “disadvantage” of being small survived evolution can be explained by the domestication of these tiny canines by humans.
‘Coz aren’t tiny dogs just so sweet?
But the funny thing about it is they found the same gene present in Rottweilers. Maybe they’re really tiny dogs in big costumes.
======= Iron-rich food consumed today : BROCCOLLI.=======
Losing hair? Maybe it’s time for a hair transplant.
penny April 5th, 2007
There is this team of behavioral research in the UK that were studying how poor and rich students react to monetary rewards. The premise was “Rich students don’t value money” and of course the results were pretty much obvious. Anyhow, they were getting thrilling reactions from the poor students for very little money.
The funny thing was this. The research team…
“…would have liked to see how the brains of the wealthier students responded to larger cash amounts, but his research team lacked sufficient funding to offer subjects larger monetary rewards.”
Hehehehe.
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It is interesting to find celebrities Blog, a keen little site about the latest hollywood tidbits.
penny April 3rd, 2007
One of the feeds I get on a regular basis is from Nature.com, and I think this article will interest some readers, specifically the gamers out there:
Computer-game console contributes to science
If reading this article doesn’t really tickle your fancy, just have a quick look at my tiny commentary. If you’re still not interested, please just have a look at the closing part of the article…
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