This week is currently the start of 18th grade for me and the other students at UC Irvine, so I thought I might take a moment to review what I’ll be studying this quarter and some plans for the long term.

Study List

This quarter is my first heavy foray into the game theory part of the LPS department. Not only will I be taking the perennial Social Dynamics seminar, but I will also be studying learning in games through a seminar which will be reading The Theory of Learning in Games by Fudenberg and Levine, as well as parts of Strategic Learning and its Limits by H. Peyton Young. Hopefully by the end of the quarter I will be sufficiently caught up in the game theory that might be relevant for future work I’ll be doing.

I am also taking a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and one called Geometry and Spacetime. The first I am taking primarily because I need to fill a requirement, but the second could turn out to be quite interesting. At the very least, the first four weeks or so will be some interesting math.

Future Plans

At this point, I am virtually certain that I will be trying to focus on something in the neighborhood of evolutionary game theory. The field is quite interesting, though I feel quite behind on the literature and current status still. There is a nice mixture of programming, math, and philosophy such that I shouldn’t get bored with it anytime remotely soon.

Over the summer, I also started to introduce myself to topics in philosophy of biology, which tends to crop up a lot in the neighborhood of game theory, probably due to the evolutionary nature of a lot of the work being done around here. Though it may not be the most detailed introduction, I recommend Darwin by Tim Lewens. I gave what I thought was a nice overview of many standard phil-bio topics and their relevance to Darwin’s works.

I also have been working heavily on a paper in game theory considering more in-depth the connections between combinatorial communication and deception that I was introduced to in Lachmann and Bergstrom’s “The disadvantage of combinatorial communication.” Though it is still not properly framed, I have high hopes that it may turn into a paper for my portfolio, which is due in approximately one year.