James Fowler, a UC Davis political scientist (with whom I may be collaborating on some future Congressional networks research---we've been discussing some of this stuff on and off since May) is co-running a contest with Michael Laver of NYU a tournament for party strategies in a dynamic agent-based spatial model of party competition. This contest is directly motivated by Robert Axelrod's famous tournament for strategies in the repeat-play prisoner’s dilemma game, in which some variant of the Tit-for-Tat strategy keeps winning every time. (The simplest version of this strategy is to do in turn N [namely, defect or cooperate] exactly what your opponent did in turn N - 1 with a 50/50 initial condition.)
The link I gave has a lot more details for this contest, which is ideal for applied mathematics/CS/algorithm people. The deadline is 4/15 (probably no coincidence there). I only remembered to pass along this info recently---James asked me to pass this along recently when he was giving me some comments on a paper draft I'm about to submit for publication. I saw the announcement on his website earlier, but I hadn't remembered to spread the news. Stuff like this would make a superb project for Caltech undergrads (ignoring their time constraints, for a second) and former ones, for that matter.
(Note: This is a republishing of an entry from yesterday that accidently got erased. Blogspot's been a bit flaky during the last day or so.)
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