scholarly journals Infect While the Iron is Scarce: Nutrient Explicit Phage-Bacteria Games

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Muratore ◽  
Joshua S. Weitz

AbstractMarine microbial primary production is influenced by the availability and uptake of essential nutrients, including iron. Although marine microbes have evolved mechanisms to scavenge sub-nanomolar concentrations of iron, recent observations suggest that viruses may co-opt these very same mechanisms to facilitate infection. The “Ferrojan Horse Hypothesis” proposes that viruses incorporate iron atoms into their tail fiber proteins to adsorb to target host receptors. Here, we propose an evolutionary game theoretic approach to consider the joint strategies of hosts and viruses in environments with limited nutrients (like iron). We analyze the bimatrix game and find that evolutionarily stable strategies depend on the stability and quality of nutrient conditions. For example, in highly stable iron conditions, virus pressure does not change host uptake strategies. However, when iron levels are dynamic, virus pressure can lead to fluctuations in the extent to which hosts invest in metabolic machinery that increases both iron uptake and susceptibility to viral infection. Altogether, this evolutionary game model provides further evidence that viral infection and nutrient dynamics jointly shape the fate of microbial populations.

Author(s):  
Nick Zangwill

Abstract I give an informal presentation of the evolutionary game theoretic approach to the conventions that constitute linguistic meaning. The aim is to give a philosophical interpretation of the project, which accounts for the role of game theoretic mathematics in explaining linguistic phenomena. I articulate the main virtue of this sort of account, which is its psychological economy, and I point to the casual mechanisms that are the ground of the application of evolutionary game theory to linguistic phenomena. Lastly, I consider the objection that the account cannot explain predication, logic, and compositionality.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Khaled Fawagreh ◽  
Mohamed Medhat Gaber

To make healthcare available and easily accessible, the Internet of Things (IoT), which paved the way to the construction of smart cities, marked the birth of many smart applications in numerous areas, including healthcare. As a result, smart healthcare applications have been and are being developed to provide, using mobile and electronic technology, higher diagnosis quality of the diseases, better treatment of the patients, and improved quality of lives. Since smart healthcare applications that are mainly concerned with the prediction of healthcare data (like diseases for example) rely on predictive healthcare data analytics, it is imperative for such predictive healthcare data analytics to be as accurate as possible. In this paper, we will exploit supervised machine learning methods in classification and regression to improve the performance of the traditional Random Forest on healthcare datasets, both in terms of accuracy and classification/regression speed, in order to produce an effective and efficient smart healthcare application, which we have termed eGAP. eGAP uses the evolutionary game theoretic approach replicator dynamics to evolve a Random Forest ensemble. Trees of high resemblance in an initial Random Forest are clustered, and then clusters grow and shrink by adding and removing trees using replicator dynamics, according to the predictive accuracy of each subforest represented by a cluster of trees. All clusters have an initial number of trees that is equal to the number of trees in the smallest cluster. Cluster growth is performed using trees that are not initially sampled. The speed and accuracy of the proposed method have been demonstrated by an experimental study on 10 classification and 10 regression medical datasets.


Author(s):  
Pi ◽  
Gao ◽  
Chen ◽  
Liu

Evidence shows that there are many work-related accidents and injuries happening in construction projects and governments have taken a series of administrative measures to reduce casualties in recent years. However, traditional approaches have reached a bottleneck due to ignoring market forces, and thus new measures should be conducted. This study develops a perspective of safety performance (SP) for construction projects in China and puts forward a conception of the safety information system by using several brainstorming sessions to strengthen the safety supervision of participants in the construction industry. This system provides rating information to the public, and bad performance contractors enter into a blacklist which will influence their economic activities. Considering the limited rationality of government and various contractors, this paper builds a reasonable evolutionary game model to verify the feasibility of the safety information system. The analysis results show that there is not a single set of evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSs), as different situations may lead to different ESSs. The efficiency of applying the safety information system (the blacklist) in the construction industry can be proved by reducing the government’s safety supervision cost and by enhancing construction safety at the same time.


2016 ◽  
Vol 283 (1842) ◽  
pp. 20161993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon G. McNickle ◽  
Miquel A. Gonzalez-Meler ◽  
Douglas J. Lynch ◽  
Jennifer L. Baltzer ◽  
Joel S. Brown

Plants appear to produce an excess of leaves, stems and roots beyond what would provide the most efficient harvest of available resources. One way to understand this overproduction of tissues is that excess tissue production provides a competitive advantage. Game theoretic models predict overproduction of all tissues compared with non-game theoretic models because they explicitly account for this indirect competitive benefit. Here, we present a simple game theoretic model of plants simultaneously competing to harvest carbon and nitrogen. In the model, a plant's fitness is influenced by its own leaf, stem and root production, and the tissue production of others, which produces a triple tragedy of the commons. Our model predicts (i) absolute net primary production when compared with two independent global datasets; (ii) the allocation relationships to leaf, stem and root tissues in one dataset; (iii) the global distribution of biome types and the plant functional types found within each biome; and (iv) ecosystem responses to nitrogen or carbon fertilization. Our game theoretic approach removes the need to define allocation or vegetation type a priori but instead lets these emerge from the model as evolutionarily stable strategies. We believe this to be the simplest possible model that can describe plant production.


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