Category Archives: Games

To cheer you up in difficult times 26: Two real-life lectures yesterday at the Technion

Posted on June 9, 2021 by Gil Kalai

After 16 months without lecturing to an audience in my same location, I gave yesterday two lectures at the Technion in front of a live audience (and some additional audience in remote locations). The main lecture was in COMSOC 2021, … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Convex polytopes, Economics, Games, Rationality | Tagged | Leave a comment

Benjamini and Mossel’s 2000 Account: Sensitivity of Voting Schemes to Mistakes and Manipulations

Posted on November 10, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Here is a popular account by Itai Benjamini and Elchanan Mossel from 2000 written shortly after the 2000 US presidential election. Elchanan and Itai kindly agreed that I will publish it here,  for the first time, 20 years later!  I … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Games, Probability, Rationality | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Test Your Intuition (46): What is the Reason for Maine’s Huge Influence?

Posted on October 26, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Very quick updates: Corona: Israel is struggling with the pandemic with some successes,  some failures, and much debate. Peace: We have peace agreements now with several Arab countries, most recently with Sudan. This is quite stunning. Internal politics: As divided … Continue reading →

Posted in Games, Probability, Statistics, Test your intuition | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Three games to cheer you up.

Posted on October 11, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Here are three cool games prepared by students of my 2020 Game Theory class. Enjoy! (More games will come later. See this post for an earlier game.) Four-in -a-row with HEX board by: Daniella Drori, Margot Guetta, Eyal Magen and … Continue reading →

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To cheer you up in difficult times 10: Noam Elkies’ Piano Improvisations and more

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Gil Kalai

For the previous post “quantum matters” click here. Noam D. Elkies piano improvisations Every day since March 27, 2020 Noam Elkies (Noam’s home page) uploaded a new piece of piano improvisation. The Hebrew title of his page is “Music will … Continue reading →

Posted in Games, Music, Number theory | Tagged | Leave a comment

To cheer you up in difficult times 6: Play Rani Sharim’s two-player games of life, read Maya Bar-Hillel presentation on catching lies with statistics, and more.

Posted on June 26, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Sorry for the long blog silence. In this post I wish to give a few links each of which probably deserves a full post. I will start with Rani Sharim’s two-player variants of John Conway’s game-of-life Here is a web-page … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Games, Rationality | Tagged , | 2 Comments

To cheer you up in difficult times 4: Women In Theory present — I will survive

Posted on May 11, 2020 by Gil Kalai

An amazing video (Update, May18 2020). I failed to explain what WIT is and this may have caused some misunderstanding. Here is a description from the Simons Institute site. “The Women in Theory (WIT) Workshop is intended for graduate and … Continue reading →

Posted in Academics, Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Convexity, Games, Philosophy, Poetry, What is Mathematics, Women in science | 14 Comments

Harsanyi’s Sweater

Posted on April 21, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Today is the Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel.  Here is a moving story from the  paper  about  John Harsanyi,  Harsanyi’s Sweater, by Robert J. Aumann. It is 1944 in Budapest, and John is in his early twenties. He has been … Continue reading →

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Game Theory – on-line Course at IDC, Herzliya

Posted on March 29, 2020 by Gil Kalai

Game theory, a graduate course at IDC, Herzliya; Lecturer: Gil Kalai; TA: Einat Wigderson,  ZOOM mentor: Ethan. Starting Tuesday March 31, I am giving an on-line course (in Hebrew) on Game theory at IDC, Herzliya (IDC English site; IDC Chinese … Continue reading →

Posted in Combinatorics, Computer Science and Optimization, Economics, Games, Rationality, Teaching | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Test Your Intuition 42: How Much do you Gain by Knowing The Game You Play?

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Gil Kalai

There are two players  – the row player and the column player and there are two possible zero-sum games described in the picture below. For each of these games the row players has two strategies T (top) and Bottom (B) … Continue reading →

Posted in Games, Test your intuition | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments