Sylvain Sorin, professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) and authority on the field of game theory, gave a six-day course at the Center for Mathematical Modeling of Universidad de Chile (CMM) on game theory, which he has kept strong and close collaboration ties for more than 20 years with.
“I have visited CMM ten times since 1997. I met Rafael Correa, Roberto Cominetti and Alejandro Jofré when they studied in France in the 1980s and 1990s. After they had come back to Chile, we have remained in contact. With Felipe Álvarez, I have also worked as thesis supervisor”, said Sylvain Sorin.
Sorin, who have lectured in France since 1985 and is an associated researcher of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, (CNRS), considered that “at CMM there is a group of people highly interested in game theory”. Indeed, two years ago in Valparaíso the Center prepared the School and Workshop on Dynamic Games and its Applications, where Sylvain was part of the organizing committee. Moreover, he has trained twenty researchers in France and three in Chile.
“This theory is important for our research. It is a tool to solve problems that have the enterprises and individuals we work for. Therefore, having Sylvain Sorin as a lecturer is a big opportunity, as he is one of the most active and prestigious experts worldwide”, explained Alejandro Jofré, CMM director.
The sessions, which were held at CMM during the second and the third weeks of December, were addressed to advanced students in engineering, as well as researchers of the university. Among the topics presented were dynamics in population and congestion games, consistent unilateral procedures for on-line prediction, and stochastic approximation for differential inclusions
Jorge Prado, CMM project engineer who attended the course, pointed out: “It is an unknown area for me, but about which I would like to go very deep. I had found the games theory very attractive already when I was writing my engineering thesis. At that moment, I heard a lot about Sylvain.”
The game theory is focused on dynamic strategic interactions. How different actors with incomplete information will play in certain scenarios. A famous problem of this theory is the prisoner dilemma, where two prisoners can confess or not confess, getting the mildest punishment if both doesn’t confess. The issue is every one doesn’t know how the other will act.
The scope of applications of this theory is broad: from war and sports to economics and management. In fact, issues like sustainable development or traffic are addressed by this theory. For instance, it studies the behavior of people on the Internet. Through data analysis it shows if and in which way users activate advertisements. So, every day new decisions are taken and new data collected, which creates new connections with statistics and machine learning.
