When you know you’re over your head

I was sitting in a conference the other day about applying game theory to networking. The idea, in a nutshell, is to teach computers (and other network nodes) to treat the network as a cooperative game. If they’re competitive, the network as a whole suffers, but if they work together it’s good for everyone’s traffic.

Anyway, that’s the gist. I can’t tell you any more because the discussion rapidly progressed into math that I just don’t understand; symbols went on the board that I’ve never seen, and letters were written in specific fonts. (You just know that an Old English “R” means something specific.)

But what finally made me realize that I wasn’t going to get much out of the presentation was when this phrase reared its head:

The von Neumann-Morgenstern Axioms are key to the existence of expected utility representations.

I know when to cut my losses. I was outta there.