Michael Wooldridge is like the teacher you wish you’d had: approachable, able to explain difficult things in simple terms, neither dauntingly highbrow nor off-puttingly cool, and genuinely enthusiastic about what he does. “I love it when you see the light go on in somebody, when they understand something that they didn’t understand before,” he says. “I find that incredibly gratifying.”
He comes across a regular sort of guy, which, as an Oxford professor with more than 500 scientific articles and 10 books to his name, he clearly isn’t. Typically, his favourite work is his contribution to Ladybird’s Expert Books – an update of the classic children’s series – on artificial intelligence. “I’m very proud of this,” he says, as he hands me a copy from his bookshelf. We’re in his study in the University of Oxford’s somewhat municipal computing department on a sunny spring day. Maybe it’s the campus setting, but our discussion almost takes the form of a seminar.
Wooldridge is an adept public communicator, especially on artificial intelligence – a field he has worked in for more than 30 years, but about which he retains a healthy scepticism. In his 2023 Christmas lectures for the Royal Institution, titled The Truth about AI, he brought in a robotic dog and asked his school-age audience to vote on whether they’d whack it with a baseball bat. And, to explain reinforcement learning, he recreated the classic 80s movie WarGames, in which a young Matthew Broderick averts nuclear catastrophe by getting the US military computer to play noughts and crosses with itself (until it concludes there is no real way to win). “Matthew Broderick was in London at the time. We tried to get him to come on the Christmas lecture, but he couldn’t do it,” says Wooldridge. “So we called our computer BrodeRick in his honour.”
WarGames is actually pretty close to the subject of Wooldridge’s latest book, Life Lessons from Game Theory: The Art of Thinking Strategically in a Complex World. He’s taught the subject to his students for more than 15 years, he says. Now it’s our turn. There’s no maths in Wooldridge’s book; instead he translates game theory into 21 digestible scenarios, incorporating everything from Atlantic cod fishing, to Pepsi v Coca-Cola, to the existence of God.
“It is surprising how many global events can be explained by a relatively small number of game theoretic models,” Wooldridge says. One of the simplest is the game of “chicken”, which he illustrates in his book using a scene from the James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause (none of his students had heard of it, he admits). Two teenagers drive their cars towards a cliff; the first to jump is the “chicken”, and loses the game. If both jump at the same time, it’s a draw; don’t jump at all and you’ve lost the game pretty badly (spoiler…
Source link
Disclaimer
We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.
Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]
