14,081 research outputs found
Pure Nash Equilibria: Hard and Easy Games
We investigate complexity issues related to pure Nash equilibria of strategic
games. We show that, even in very restrictive settings, determining whether a
game has a pure Nash Equilibrium is NP-hard, while deciding whether a game has
a strong Nash equilibrium is SigmaP2-complete. We then study practically
relevant restrictions that lower the complexity. In particular, we are
interested in quantitative and qualitative restrictions of the way each players
payoff depends on moves of other players. We say that a game has small
neighborhood if the utility function for each player depends only on (the
actions of) a logarithmically small number of other players. The dependency
structure of a game G can be expressed by a graph DG(G) or by a hypergraph
H(G). By relating Nash equilibrium problems to constraint satisfaction problems
(CSPs), we show that if G has small neighborhood and if H(G) has bounded
hypertree width (or if DG(G) has bounded treewidth), then finding pure Nash and
Pareto equilibria is feasible in polynomial time. If the game is graphical,
then these problems are LOGCFL-complete and thus in the class NC2 of highly
parallelizable problems
A comparison between different optimization criteria for tuned mass dampers design
Tuned mass sampers (TMDs) are widely used strategies for vibration control in many engineering applications, so that many TMD optimization criteria have been proposed till now. However, they normally consider only TMD stiffness and damping as design variables and assume that the tuned mass is a pre-selected value. In this work a more complete approach is proposed and then also TMD mass ratio is optimized. A standard single degree of freedom system is investigated to evaluate TMD protection efficiency in case of excitation at the support. More precisely, this model is used to develop two different optimizations criteria which minimize the main system displacement or the inertial acceleration. Different environmental conditions described by various char- acterizations of the input, here modelled by a stationary filtered stochastic process, are considered. Results show that all solutions obtained considering also the mass of the TMD as design variable are more efficient if compared with those obtained without it. However, in many cases these solutions are inappropriate because the optimal TMD mass is greater than real admissible values in practical technical applications for civil and mechanical engineering. Anyway, one can deduce that there are some interesting indications for applications in some actual contexts. In fact, the results show that there are some ranges of environmental parameters ranges where results attained by the displacement criterion are compatible with real applications requiring some percent of main system mass. Finally, the present research gives promising indications for complete TMD optimization application in emerging technical contexts, as micro- mechanical devices and nano resonant beam
Removal of carbon monoxide. Physical adsorption on natural and synthetic zeolites
The utilization of natural zeolite materials in the elimination of polluting gases is investigated. Carbon monoxide pollution is emphasized because its concentration may reach dangerous levels in places such as vehicle tunnels, underground parking lots, etc. The elimination of carbon monoxide is also of interest in some industrial processes relating to the production of pure gases
Energy density fluctuations in Early Universe
The primordial nucleosinthesys of the element can be influenced by the
transitions of phase that take place after the Big Bang, such as the QCD
transition. In order to study the effect of this phase transition, in this work
we compute the time evolution of thermodynamical quantities of the early
universe, focusing on temperature and energy density fluctuations, by solving
the relevant equations of motion using as input the lattice QCD equation of
state to describe the strongly interacting matter in the early universe plasma.
We also study the effect of a primordial strong magnetic field by means of a
phenomenological equation of state. Our results show that small inhomogeneities
of strongly interacting matter in the early Universe are moderately damped
during the crossover.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Talk given at Sventh European Summer School on
Experimental Nuclear Astrophysics, 15-27 September 2013, Santa Tecla (CT) -
Ital
Scalings of Elliptic Flow for a Fluid at Finite Shear Viscosity
Within a parton cascade approach we investigate the scaling of the
differential elliptic flow with eccentricity and system
size and its sensitivity to finite shear viscosity. We present calculations for
shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in the range from up
to , finding that the saturation value varies by about a factor 2.
Scaling of is seen also for finite which
indicates that it does not prove a perfect hydrodynamical behavior, but is
compatible with a plasma at finite . Introducing a suitable freeze-out
condition, we see a significant reduction of especially at
intermediate and for more peripheral collisions. This causes a breaking
of the scaling for both and the averaged , while keeping
the scaling of v_2(p_T)/\la v_2\ra. This is in better agreement with the
experimental observations and shows as a first indication that the
should be significantly lower than the pQCD estimates. We finally point out the
necessity to include the hadronization via coalescence for a definite
evaluation of from intermediate data.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. Two points in fig.4 has been change
Strategic maritime container transport design in oligopolistic markets
AbstractThis paper considers the maritime container assignment problem in a market setting with two competing firms. Given a series of known, exogenous demands for service between pairs of ports, each company is free to design a liner service network serving a subset of the ports and demand, subject to the size of their fleets and the potential for profit. The model is designed as a three-stage complete information game: in the first stage, the firms simultaneously invest in their fleet; in the second stage, they individually design their networks and solve the route assignment problem with respect to the transport demand they expect to serve, given the fleet determined in the first stage; in the final stage, the firms compete in terms of freight rates on each origin-destination movement. The game is solved by backward induction. Numerical solutions are provided to characterize the equilibria of the game
- …