Game Theory in Practice

The Economist has a fun article on Game Theory in Practice about a few companies using agent-based modeling approaches to make predictions about real-world events. These are the same type of models that you will be building, except not as large, of course. Check out the video. Still, I think there is a large chasm to cross from saying that your model predicts the general dynamics of a population, to predicting the fall of Hosni Mubarak within a year. Until someone puts up his 'annual predictions' up on the web every year, for several years, so everyone can verify them, I shall remain a skeptic on our ability to make such fine-grained predictions.

Oh, and that same issue features pmarca's article on how software is eating the world, which he first mentioned in his WSJ piece. Indeed. Even hardware is software now (cf. 3D printers).