Revised subject: tomorrow's informal seminar

[Cond.Matt. & Stat.Mech.Section]

INFORMAL SEMINAR on    Statistical Physics


Luigi Stasi Seminar Room -  Leonardo Building     (first floor)



Thursday, 17 June -     4:00 p.m.
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Bikas K. CHAKRABARTI     ( Saha Institute of Nulcar Physics, Kolkata )



"Statistics of the Kolkata Paise Restaurant problem"



Abstract

We will discuss the dynamics of stochastic learning strategies for the  
'Kolkata Paise Restaurant' problem, where N agents choose among N  
equally priced but differently ranked restaurants every evening such  
that each agent tries get to dinner in the best restaurant (each  
serving only one customer and the rest arriving there going without  
dinner that evening).  Informations regarding the restaurant ques in  
the previous nights are available to everybody and each agent employs  
strategies in parallel to choose the respective restaurant every  
evening.  We consider the learning  strategies to be similar for all  
the agents and assume that each follow the same probabilistic or  
stochastic strategy dependent on the information of the past successes  
in the game.  We show that some 'naive' strategies lead to much better  
utilization of the services than some relatively 'smarter'  
strategies.  A "dictated "  solution to the problem is much more  
efficient and quicker than the above- mentioned ("democratically  
arrived") solutions.  Both numerical and analytical results will be  
discussed.



Refs:

1. A. S. Chakrabarti, B. K. Chakrabarti, A. Chatterjee & M. Mitra,  
Kolkata Paise Restaurant Problem & Resource Utilisation, Physica A 388  
(2009) 2420

2. A. Ghosh & B. K. Chakrabarti, Kolkata Paise Restaurant Problem, http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/KolkataPaiseRestaurantKPRProblem

3. A. Ghosh, A. Chatterjee, M. Mitra & B. K. Chakrabarti , Statistics  
of Kolkata Paise Restaurant Problem, New J. Phys. 12 (2010; in press)