As this entry goes online, I will be in Minneapolis at the annual INFORMS conference presenting a paper entitled “A Cooperative Dual for the Nash Equilibrium.” The gist of this research is that people can often fare better in competitive situations if they cooperate. However, the more profound implication of the work is that complete cooperation is guaranteed to be possible only between two competitors, not three or more. In other words, there is a mathematical limit to complete cooperation. Apparently, three’s a crowd, like we all knew already. In addition, I will be attending the conference “Learning and the Brain” at Harvard in November. At the INFORMS conference, I will also be working on a Systems Engineering research proposal with Dr. Ferreira.
Dr. Rosenberger, a recent IMSE Ph.D. graduate, and I submitted in August a paper entitled “Constraint Optimal Selection Techniques (COSTs) for Nonnegative Linear Programming Problems” to Optimization Methods and Software about an approach to solve huge, currently unsolvable linear programming problems quickly, as demanded by today’s high-speed, high-tech, ever-accelerating world. Linear programming, as you may remember, is the most widely used computational model in the business and scientific worlds. The method was also the basis of a recently issued patent entitled “System, Method and Apparatus for Allocating Resources by Constraint Selection.”
Finally, I will be headed abroad over the winter break and stop thinking about all this heady stuff. Enjoy your semester.
Written by Dr. Bill Corley
IMSE Faculty