This week I stumbled across a fascinating paper by William H. Press and Freeman J. Dyson titled "Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma contains strategies that dominate any evolutionary opponent," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I think it is fair to say it is the most interesting thing I have read this year. Press and Dyson have somehow discovered something completely new and profound in a field that has already been studied extensively for decades, and have written a beautifully clear and concise paper that you require only some elementary linear algebra to understand. This is the kind of paper we would all love to write, and I've found it hard to stop thinking about it since I first read it a few days ago.
(Incidentally, there is also a physics connection here. Although Press is a computational biologist at the University of Texas he happens to have written several papers in theoretical astrophysics and cosmology, including a famous one with Paul Schechter in 1974, which is one of the most highly cited theoretical papers in all of cosmology. He is also one of the authors of the Numerical Recipes books, which anyone who has ever done any programming has probably used at some point. Dyson is best known to physicists for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics, in particular for being the first person — other than Feynman — to recognise the importance of the Feynman diagram. According to Steven Weinberg he was "fleeced" of a Nobel. He's also a remarkable 88 years old. You can read a beautiful character portrait of this complicated man here.)
(Incidentally, there is also a physics connection here. Although Press is a computational biologist at the University of Texas he happens to have written several papers in theoretical astrophysics and cosmology, including a famous one with Paul Schechter in 1974, which is one of the most highly cited theoretical papers in all of cosmology. He is also one of the authors of the Numerical Recipes books, which anyone who has ever done any programming has probably used at some point. Dyson is best known to physicists for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics, in particular for being the first person — other than Feynman — to recognise the importance of the Feynman diagram. According to Steven Weinberg he was "fleeced" of a Nobel. He's also a remarkable 88 years old. You can read a beautiful character portrait of this complicated man here.)
