Jules Hedges: Compositional Game Theory

MIT Category Theory Seminar
2019/01/31
Abstract: Open games are a foundation of non-cooperative game theory that is strongly compositional: all games are built from small pieces using sequential and parallel composition operators. They form the morphisms of a symmetric monoidal category, and string diagrams provide a useful and intuitive way of visualising them that is an alternative to the traditional extensive form. I will focus on the foundations, which involves a careful analysis of how observable and counterfactual information interact in a game. Time permitting I'll discuss a close connection with open learners, from the paper Backprop as Functor by Fong, Spivak and Tuyéras.