What physics has to do with the analysis of social systems? Well, society is a complex system after all, so we can approach it as we would any complex system. Though, as usual, domain knowledge is often useful in such approaches.

We invite you to watch this interesting video scripted and edited by J. Llabres and Sara Oliver from IFISC.

With this post we going on summer hiatus. See you in September!

When teaching Numerical Methods and Matlab I like to challenge myself and take upon doing some new practical project to show my students how to apply their newly acquired skills to do something fun. This video is from the 2020 spring semester and in it I explore service time of a wireless mouse with two batteries.

For detailed problem statement and the solution see the recording on Youtube. Though, notably, the sound quality of the recording was not good. You can also find more details on GitHub, too (check out https://github.com/akononovicius/NMI-coding-session-archive/tree/main/2020-battery-problem).

Earlier videos as well as my other impressions on Matlab can be found more easily by checking out #Matlab tag.

A year ago I have shared recording of my lecture in which I have used Matlab and Markov chains to solve board game Monopoly. The solution revolved around finding properties, which were visited most often.

The following youtube video discusses a different approach based on machine learning.

Typically due to friction (or other dissipative forces) physical systems reach stationary states, even if it takes really long time. Nonlinear systems, on the other hand, sometimes exhibit strange and erratic behavior.

Last time we have looked at how four different parking strategies work when inflow of drivers is homogeneous. We have done similarly to what was done in [1, 2], though our angle was a bit different.

This time we have modified the approach further. Namely, now we allow you to randomize the inflow of drivers and explore how do the performance of these strategies change in nonhomogeneous society.