Swine flu and the prisoner’s dilemma
Date: January 25th 2011
The power of words
Getting vaccinated against swine flu isn’t rational, and I can prove it with your favorite television cop show. What’s more, I don’t even need to know which one is your favorite.No, I’m not Carnac the Magnificent, and this isn’t a magic trick. All cop shows rely on a classic problem from the branch of applied mathematics called Game Theory. The math problem is called The Prisoner’s Dilemma and works like this: the cops take a suspect into a room and offer him a deal if he rats on his buddy.
Simple as that.
Doesn’t sound like math is involved, I know, but in fact mathematicians go nuts over this problem. Doctoral theses have been written, computer algorithms designed, Nobel prizes won, Martian invasions thwarted, you name it...
(read the rest here: http://www.jpattitude.com/110126.php)
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