Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

NYT has given coverage to the recent letter signed by many AI researchers against proliferation of autonomous weapons. The letter has been unveiled at the IJCAI 2015 conference that is taking place in Buenos Aires this week.

The Guardian reviews the recent biography by Siobhan Roberts on John Horton Conway . John Horton Conway Conway as you may know has made contributions to such diverse fields as group theory, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He is probably best known for his Game of Life and his book series " Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays ". For those interested in fair division problems, Conway is also one of the founders of the Selfridge-Conway envy-free cake cutting protocol for three agents. Interestingly, the review as well as the book features the sprouts game that was invented in Cambridge by Conway and my PhD supervisor Mike Paterson.

The Lorentz Center hosts an interesting series of workshops on scientific topics. Recently, a workshop on Clusters, Games and Axioms was organized. The program and slides are available from: http://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2015/702/info.php3?wsid=702&venue=Oort

[Intended for a more general audience. Initial draft: comment welcome] Adjusted Winner Procedure The Adjusted Winner procedure is a well-known fair division mechanism to settle disputes and divide resource between two parties. It was proposed by political scientist Steven Brams and mathematician Alan Taylor: Since the allocation of resources is typically seen in the context of conflict and cooperation, the parties are referred to as agents  or player as is standard in the field of game theory. Adjusted Winner has been advocated as a fair division rule for divorce settlements, international border conflicts and real estate disputes. It has been termed as a way to obtain a win-win solution . For example, it has been shown that the agreement reached during Jimmy Carter’s presidency between Israel and Egypt is very close to what Adjusted Winner would have predicted . Adjusted Winner has been patented by New York University and licensed to the law firm...

Congratulations to Toby Walsh for his  Candy Crush article from the American Scientist which has just been selected for the 2015 annual anthology  "The Best Writing on Mathematics", published by Princeton University Press. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~tw/wamericanscientist2014.pdf   This year's anthology has work from a number of well known writers including the famous mathematician (and inventor of the Game of Life) John Conway, and the scientist and New York Times writer Stephen Strogatz. Past anthologies have included articles written by the Nobel prize winner Lloyd Shapley, and the Field's medalist and Australian of the Year, Terence Tao.

Twenty four years after winning the Nobel Prize for his work on Nash equilibrium, John Nash has now won the Abel Prize for work in the field of geometric analysis . Princeton University has a nice piece on Nash's achievements.

A radio interview on artificial intelligence on ABC radio: http://blogs.abc.net.au/queensland/2015/03/artificial-intelligence.html?site=brisbane&program=612_afternoons