Competition networks and ranking in games and social hierarchies
Competition networks and ranking in games and social hierarchies
Abstract
One of the oldest of network problems is the ranking of individuals, teams, or commodities on the basis of pairwise comparisons between them. For example, if you know which teams in a certain sport beat which others this season, can you say which team is the best overall? This is a harder problem than it sounds because not all pairs of teams play one another in a given season, and also because the outcomes of the games can be ambiguous or contradictory. This talk will introduce the techniques used to solve such ranking problems, with examples from games and sports, consumer research and marketing, and social hierarchies in both animal and human communities, then ask how those techniques can be extended to address a range of new questions about competition and ranking, including the development of new computer algorithms for ranking, questions about the varying patterns of competition in different sports, and what happens when individuals or teams compete in multiple different ways.
Online (Zoom) :
https://iu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QXAmc5gvRGOWGRwV6rKD bw
Short Bio
Mark Newman received a PhD in physics from Oxford University in 1991 and did postdoctoral work at Cornell University before taking a faculty position at the Santa Fe Institute and then in 2002 at the University of Michigan, where he is currently the Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics and a professor in the university’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems. Among other honors, Professor Newman is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Network Science Society, he has been a Simon’s Foundation Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and was winner of the ISI Lagrange Prize in 2014, the Network Science Society Euler Prize in 2021, and the APS Kadanoff Prize in 2024. He is the author of over 180 scientific publications and seven books, including “Networks”, an introduction to the field of network theory, now in its second edition.