StarCraft and StarCraft II are very popular real time strategy games. The core of these games is the mining of resources, and conversion of those resources into specialized military units. Idealized fighting and predator/prey relations have long been analyzed in terms of differential equations. We use the differential equation formalism (in particular Lanchester’s equations of 1916) to discuss expected game outcomes and how, in principle, one can derive a StarCraft strategy that complements search, simulation or more classic artificial intelligence techniques.
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We describe the “the local to global principle.” It is a principle used to break algorithmic problem solving into two distinct phases (local criticism followed by global solution) and is an aid both in the design and in the application of algorithms. Instead of giving a formal definition of the principle we quickly define it and discuss a few examples and methods. We have produced both a stand-alone PDF (more legible) and a HTML/blog form (more skimable).
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Betting Best of Series is a new expository paper describing the mathematics involved in betting on something like the United States’ Major League Baseball World Series. It isn’t so much about baseball as about demonstrating some of the really great ideas from mathematical finance in a simplified setting. This sort analysis is the “secret sauce” in a lot of financial models and I trying to share the thrilling feeling of working with these techniques in an elementary essay (with diagrams). Read more…
author: John Mount
I have finally written up and released a paper in PDF: Automatic Generation and Testing of Trades describing a lot of the statistics and optimization methods used when I was technical trading on a Banc of America Securities proprietary program trading desk. It was a very exciting time.
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