Mark Newman, Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics and Complex Systems; External Faculty - Santa Fe Institute.

ABSTRACT: One of the oldest of network problems is the ranking of individuals, teams, or commodities on the basis of pairwise comparisons between them. For example, if you know which football teams beat which others in a particular year, can you say which team is the best overall? This is a harder problem than it sounds because not all pairs of teams play games in a given season, and also because the outcomes of the games can be ambiguous or contradictory. This talk will introduce the techniques used to solve such ranking problems, with examples from games and sports, consumer research and marketing, and social hierarchies in both animal and human communities, then ask how those techniques can be extended to answer a range of new questions about competition and ranking, including the development of new computer algorithms for ranking, questions about the varying patterns of competition in different sports, and what happens when individuals or teams compete in multiple different ways.