For all you budding Kasparovs out there, a team of cognitive scientists has worked out how to think like a chess grand master. As those attending this week's Cognitive Science Society meeting in Chicago, Illinois, were told, the secret is to try to knock down your pet theory rather than finding ways to support it - exactly as scientists are supposed to do.

I teach a seminar titled "Ideas of Human Nature" in which I restrict enrollment to 15 students. Others typically want to get in, and yet much of the class's popularity stems from the benefits that come from keeping it small. Most students understand the advantages of small classes, and they wouldn't want everyone who wishes admittance to get in; just themselves! If everyone gets in, the class becomes too big and discussion is inhibited, to everyone's disadvantage. And so, each year I find myself in the difficult position of telling a number of students that there simply isn't room for them. Each student turned away from this class understands the logic, but nonetheless, each would like the limit to be expanded -- by just one.

From theories of pedestrian movement and traffic flow to voting processes, economic markets and war, researchers are striving towards a physics of society

"It may be", said US sociologist George Lundberg in 1939, "that the next great developments in the social sciences will come not from professed social scientists, but from people trained in other fields." Take a look at any issue of a physical-sciences journal in the past five years and you will see one such field staking its claim vigorously. Physics is muscling its way into social science. Not content with explaining the behaviour of atoms and electrons, semiconductors, sand and space-time, physicists are now setting out to understand the behaviour of people.

A beehive is a collaborative enterprise on far more levels than first appears.
—Matt Ridley

"The major shift in human evolution is from behaving like an animal struggling to survive to behaving like an animal choosing to evolve. In fact, in order to survive, we have to evolve. And to evolve, we need a new kind of thinking and a new kind of behavior, a new ethic and a new morality. It will be that of the evolution of everyone rather than the survival of the fittest."
- Jonas Salk

Place to discuss Newcomb's problem

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.
- Bernoulli

Charismatic leaders and media personalities can be destabilizing influences on social groups, according to various "small-world network" models. This conclusion seems intuitively consistent with historical events such as civil uprisings and religious movements.

But, surprisingly, long range connections in a network
(which reduce the degree of separation among members) seem to hinder the system's return to equilibrium, according to a new model that combines small-world scenarios with a version of the "prisoner's-dilemma" proposition, according to which a pair of captured criminals ponder strategy: if neither criminal confesses, both go free; if one confesses, the other receives a stiff sentence; if both confess, they each receive moderate sentences. The study may help us to understand the dynamics of such social behaviors as smoking among teenagers, which is influenced by various factors including local social surroundings and the examples set by media role models.

The Evolution of Cooperation
By Robert Axelrod
Copyright 1997

Prisoner's Dilemma/John Von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb
William Poundstone
Copyright 1993
ISBN 038541580X