Www.pythonxy.com. Game theory explains why some content goes viral on Reddit, Digg. A lot of attention has been lavished on ideas "going viral," but this may not be the only way that ideas spread, according to an article published in PNAS last week.
With some extensive theoretical work in game theory, two researchers have shown that trendy changes don't spread quickly just because they gain exposure to a high number of people. Instead, the spread of innovations may work more like a game where players are gauging whether to adopt something new based on what others immediately surrounding them do. The popularity growth of things like websites or gadgets is often described as being similar to an epidemic: a network with a lot of connections between people increases exposure and then adoption, as do links stretching between dissimilar groups.
When the trend in question spreads to a node with a lot of connections (like a celebrity), its popularity explodes. "It is not only the intrinsic value of a new technology (or other types of innovation) that makes it attractive. Mathematics in Moby-Dick. Twice before I have posted mathematical passages that I have stumbled upon in works of literature.
Yesterday I finished reading Moby-Dick (great book, great ending!) , so I thought I’d highlight a few mathematical passages that it contains. Especially interesting to me is the second one in which Melville mentions the impossibility of squaring a circle. At the time Moby-Dick was written (1851), that was an open question. The impossibility of squaring the circle was proved in 1882 when Lindemann proved that.