Archive for John Nash

SEINE AI

Posted in pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 23, 2026 by xi'an

Ten days ago I took part in the SEINE AI 2026 workshop in Jouy-en-Josas, near Paris (homestead of HEC), organised by the Huawei Paris Research Center.. In which I was invited to speak, even though I felt sort of an outlier given the deeply machine-learning, entreprenarial orientation of the meeting, with its theme being Building the Agentic Future of ICT, given that I chose to present our most recent Bayesian adversarial privacy paper. Hence, I stood within a game-theoretic, Bayesian, formal landscape, presumably loosing most of the audience and keeping them away from their lunch!

Other speakers included Simon Lucas from Queen Mary London on Simulation-based AI, which I had trouble distinguishing from building a statistical model by goodness of fit (and using bandits used for update), while focussing on competing on some computer game challenges. And Volker Tresp from LMU München on a tensor brain model that he opposes to a Bayesian brain (with a related paper entitled Bayes or Heisenberg: Who(se) rules? which we discussed in general terms over lunch, namely Bayesian learning vs. quantum updating. And Michal Valko from INRIA Paris (and other companies), who went full blast against the Bradley-Terry model!, with a title of Nash and Nemirovski walk into a bar! With a half-time technique approximating Nash equilibria that reminded me of leapfrog. Much entertaining talk that further provided a game-theoretic transition to mine’s.

As an aside, I played yesterday with ChatGPT composing my talk slides out of our arXiv document and it proved a disaster, with hallucinations of results and concepts not in the paper and a complete mess of handling graphs, first creating generic, fake, unrelated pictures, then inserting actual graphs haphazardly throughout the slides. The sorry result I obviously did not use as the workshop did not seem the ideal place for this sort of prank! The actual version only recycles a few of its summarising slides. (With ye Norse farce proper colour choice!)

 

an even more senseless taxi-ride

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on May 24, 2015 by xi'an

I was (exceptionally) working in (and for) my garden when my daughter shouted down from her window that John Nash had just died. I thus completed my tree trimming and went to check about this sad item of news. What I read made the news even sadder as he and his wife had died in a taxi crash in New Jersey, apparently for not wearing seat-belts, a strategy you would think far from minimax… Since Nash was in Norway a few days earlier to receive the 2015 Abel Prize, it may even be that the couple was on its way home back from the airport.  A senseless death for a Beautiful Mind.

Théorème vivant

Posted in Books, University life with tags , , , , , , , on November 7, 2012 by xi'an

When I ordered this book, Théorème Vivant (Alive Theorem), by Cédric Villani, I had misgivings about it being yet another illustration of the, pardon my French!, universal “pipolisation” process that turns values upside down and sets mundane aspects of major contemporary figures above their true achievements like, say, winning a Fields medal! However, as soon as I started reading Théorème Vivant, I realised it was a fascinating delve into the way mathematicians operate and how they build theorems. Of course, as an “insider”, I can find many entry points to relate to, some quite mundane and unrelated like entering the common room of a conference centre in the middle of the night to “steal” some life-saving tea bags or an aversion to taxi rides, not mentioning an addiction to French cheeses… And I have the advantage of being able to read the math formulas given in the book (even though this is not at all my area of expertise and I find the wording of the theorems and proofs rather unusual at times). But I think Théorème Vivant can be read by non-mathematicians as well, provided they take those formulas and paper extracts as pictures, just like the drawings of mathematicians interspeded throughout the book and do not get annoyed at not understanding the meaning of them (I do not get the deepest levels either!). Nothing to be afraid of: Théorème Vivant is another impressive illustration of the ability of Cédric Villani to explain mathematics to the general public and to surf upon his popularity with the medias. (The book is currently available in French only, but should soon be translated into English. Possibly polishing the least politically correct statements…) Continue reading →