Drawing on media economics and critical theory and political economy, this paper will provide a critical reading of the blockbuster video game. While blockbuster games are considered to be highly innovative by constantly pushing technological boundaries, they are also considered to be formulaic and its themes and game mechanics fairly predictable. The hit-driven nature of contemporary console p...

Density-dependent processes play a key role in the spatial structuring of biodiversity. Specifically, interrelated demographic processes, such as gene surfing, high-density blocking, and competitive exclusion, can generate striking geographic contrasts in the distributions of genes and species. Here, we propose that well-studied evolutionary and ecological biogeographic patterns of postglacial ...

The choice between alternative cell fates is fundamental to biology. The Gram-positive soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis can become competent for genetic transformation by external DNA or can form resistant spores. Although decades of work has elucidated much about the complex regulatory pathways that lead to these mutually exclusive fates (Dubnau and Losick, 2006), the decision mechanism that d...

Winner-Takes-All (WTA) prescriptions for Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) are studied in the framework of a model situation: Two competing prototype vectors are updated according to a sequence of example data drawn from a mixture of Gaussians. The theory of on-line learning allows for an exact mathematical description of the training dynamics, even if an underlying cost function cannot be ide...

We solve the correspondence problem with integrate and fire models. Taking into account the requirement for rapid processing, we use a spike timing code, associated with receptive fields and Winner Takes all Strategy. We study through computer experiments the properties and performance of various shapes of receptive fields. We use a perfect Integrate and Fire model, and we study the interest of...

The paper considers an environment in which multiple firms compete over the development of a product. The first firm to complete the project gains a reward whereas the other firms gain nothing. The decisions of the firms are the level of investment in the project and these decisions affect the random (exponential) completion time. The paper provides a method for explicitly computing a unique Na...

We present a theoretical foundation for competitive learning in the domain of graphs within a connectionist framework. In the first part of this contribution we embed graphs in an Euclidean space to facilitate competitive learning in the domain of graphs. We adopt constitutive concepts of competitive learning like the scalar products, metrics, and the weighted mean for graphs. The first part is...