Information Theory - The Bridge Connecting Bounded Rational Game Theory and Statistical Physics
Statistical Mechanics
2007-05-23 v1 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Computer Science and Game Theory
Multiagent Systems
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
Abstract
A long-running difficulty with conventional game theory has been how to modify it to accommodate the bounded rationality of all real-world players. A recurring issue in statistical physics is how best to approximate joint probability distributions with decoupled (and therefore far more tractable) distributions. This paper shows that the same information theoretic mathematical structure, known as Product Distribution (PD) theory, addresses both issues. In this, PD theory not only provides a principled formulation of bounded rationality and a set of new types of mean field theory in statistical physics. It also shows that those topics are fundamentally one and the same.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0402508,
title = {Information Theory - The Bridge Connecting Bounded Rational Game Theory and Statistical Physics},
author = {David H. Wolpert},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0402508},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
17 pages, no figures, accepted for publication