Timeline for Betting markets for unsolved problems?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 8, 2019 at 13:00 | review | Close votes | |||
| Apr 9, 2019 at 7:06 | |||||
| Apr 6, 2019 at 19:31 | answer | added | Joseph Van Name | timeline score: -4 | |
| Jul 2, 2010 at 16:26 | comment | added | Neel Krishnaswami | An interesting fact is the efficiency theorems about prediction markets don't hold for mathematical bets. (Whether they still work in practice is another matter entirely.) The reason is that Bayesian agents are too strong a computational model of mathematicians; the axioms of Bayesian probability theory require giving a probability of 1 to logical truths, and a probability of 0 to logical falsehoods. This means that ideal decision-theoretic agents are logically omniscient: they already know all mathematical truths, and so there is no disagreement among them, and hence, no market! | |
| Jul 2, 2010 at 3:22 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 1 | |
| May 18, 2010 at 6:41 | comment | added | Kevin Buzzard | True story: Wiles gave 3 lectures in Cambridge in 1993 and in the 3rd one he announced a proof of FLT. After the first one my friend Andy Plater (RIP Andy) tried to place a bet on FLT being proven in the near future (in the UK, where you can find a betting shop on any high street), but he was told that all bets were off concerning FLT at that point. | |
| May 18, 2010 at 5:44 | answer | added | Gil Kalai | timeline score: 15 | |
| May 18, 2010 at 5:22 | answer | added | Igor Pak | timeline score: 8 | |
| May 18, 2010 at 4:07 | comment | added | DoubleJay | It seems to me that betting markets for most of these problems are almost useless - no better than gut feeling - at any point before the program eventually leading to resolution is began. FLT had some indicators that it was achievable within a decade before its solution, but any further back than that and people had no idea. Sometimes proofs come completely out of the blue, and are even less predictable. | |
| May 18, 2010 at 1:16 | comment | added | Dan Piponi | ideosphere.com/fx-bin/ListClaims Select Science & Technology:Math and hit "Get list of claims". | |
| May 18, 2010 at 0:28 | comment | added | JSE | I know of no such attempts. I do want to point out, though, that mathematicians do have something real at stake when making predictions: status. It's as real as money, and in some ways more so. Anyway, see Robin Hanson's blog for lots of provocative discussion of prediction markets and related problems: overcomingbias.com/tag/prediction-markets | |
| May 17, 2010 at 23:45 | comment | added | Sean Rostami | But would circumventing it with other currencies preserve the integrity of the bets? I'm not sure if people care about MO points enough for this to work =). Also, my short experience with Intrade taught me that the majority of the pressure on a stock comes from the lightning-quick responses to very public information, rather than from particularly wise bettors or insiders. One obvious example was the bet on who Paterson would appoint to replace Clinton in 2008 (it wasn't Kennedy). | |
| May 17, 2010 at 22:40 | comment | added | Johannes Hahn | And who will pay Fermat his 1000 gold coins plus interest for his bet on the FLT? ;-) | |
| May 17, 2010 at 21:43 | history | asked | Vipul Naik | CC BY-SA 2.5 |