What computer science can teach economics
Monday, November 9, 2009 - 09:21
in Mathematics & Economics
(PhysOrg.com) -- Computer scientists have spent decades developing techniques for answering a single question: How long does a given calculation take to perform? Constantinos Daskalakis, an assistant professor in MIT`s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has exported those techniques to game theory, a branch of mathematics with applications in economics, traffic management -- on both the Internet and the interstate -- and biology, among other things. By showing that some common game-theoretical problems are so hard that they`d take the lifetime of the universe to solve, Daskalakis is suggesting that they can`t accurately represent what happens in the real world.