Game theory in one minute

[Magical Realist]

Probably more to it than this. But this is a good overview. I think the mathematician from "A Beautiful Mind" John Nash was into game theory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YueJukoFBMU

[C C]

Kind of skirts the territory of social physics or econophysics. Though individual humans can be capricious in behavior, as our aggregate numbers grow and interact we conform to some degree of statistical predictability: rules and probabilistic patterns. If our actions were stripped of empirical details and abstractly represented as the dynamics and magnitude properties of bare dots or particles in another universe, the latter's inhabitants would never guess there was the complexity of living beings corresponding to those elemental entities.

In the gas model, people exchange money in random interactions, much as atoms exchange energy when they collide. While economists' models traditionally regard humans as rational beings who always make intelligent decisions, econophysicists argue that in large systems the behaviour of each individual is influenced by so many factors that the net result is random, so it makes sense to treat people like atoms in a gas. The analogy also holds because money is like energy, in that it has to be conserved. "It's like a fluid that flows in interactions, it's not created or destroyed, only redistributed," says Yakovenko. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/556506

Physics of Society, Philip Ball: "It may be", said US sociologist George Lundberg in 1939, "that the next great developments in the social sciences will come not from professed social scientists, but from people trained in other fields." Take a look at any issue of a physical-sciences journal in the past five years and you will see one such field staking its claim vigorously. Physics is muscling its way into social science. Not content with explaining the behaviour of atoms and electrons, semiconductors, sand and space-time, physicists are now setting out to understand the behaviour of people.

Lundberg would have approved. He was part of a tradition that sought to establish a scientific grounding for sociology that would make it every bit as quantitative and deterministic as the natural sciences. The title of Lundberg's 1947 book - Can Science Save Us? - says it all. This positivistic approach to social science can be traced to the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who called for a "social physics" that could claim its place alongside celestial, terrestrial, mechanical and chemical physics. But the impulse to identify natural laws of society is, in fact, much older. Plato may have been the first to hint at it, and the Roman writer Cicero in the second century BC believed in laws that transcended the customs and particularities of individual nations and which would apply to societies everywhere at all times.

The physicists today who seek rules that govern traffic or market economies have inherited this tradition - whether they know it or not. Implicit in their models and equations is the assumption that despite the quirks and caprice of individual human nature, there are emergent universal properties and laws that describe these complex systems.

It is no coincidence that this echoes the notion of universality in statistical physics. Phenomena that appear at first to be unconnected, such as magnetism and the phase changes of liquids and gases, share some identical features. This universal behaviour pays no heed to whether, say, the fluid is argon or carbon dioxide. All that matters are broad-brush characteristics such as whether the system is one-, two- or three-dimensional and whether its component elements interact via long- or short-range forces (see Physics World August 2003 pp23-27). Universality says that sometimes the details do not matter.

Physicists believe this is true of many social phenomena too. It is irrelevant whether traffic is driving down the A36 to Salisbury or the A5 autobahn to Basle because the same flow phases will appear for similar traffic densities. Such invariant properties are statistical: the peculiarities of individual drivers are subsumed within the average behaviour. That is precisely why the fashion for applying physics to social science has arisen largely within the community of statistical physicists, who have developed sophisticated tools for studying the behaviour of systems with a large number of components.

[...] The basic idea is simple: we replace the atoms of conventional statistical mechanics by people. Of course, while atoms interact via well defined forces of attraction and repulsion, people are seldom so straightforward. But in some situations human interactions do not amount to very much more than this basic concept. For example, by avoiding collisions and not encroaching on one another's "personal space", we act just as though there was a repulsive force between us.