The great econophysics debate<br /> (source: "Econophysicists Matter", Editorial, Nature 441(7094) (2006): 667)

(14 June 2005)

Economics and physics are two disciplines that, contrary to widespread perceptions, have significant common agendas. Shame, then, that the professionals don't do more to recognize the fact. After hearing a talk on the application of physics to the social sciences, a physicist in a notoriously traditional department was heard to mutter that it was all very well but it wasn't 'real physics'. It was an article of faith to him that many-body theories in physics could not be applied to animate objects. Now that it seems clear that bacteria, locusts and even road traffic undergo types of dynamic phase transition, this objection is hard to sustain.
Collective Evaluation Project <br> An application of the "new information theory"

Yi-Cheng Zhang (14 June 2005)

As if it were yesterday, Econophysics Forum web site actually is seven years old. Around the summer of 1998 a handful of my colleagues who later to be labelled as ’econophysicists’ were wondering how to tap the then new WWW phenomenon to foster the fledging community. The dream was to have a kind of ‘virtual institute’, enabling scientists working on the margins of the traditional disciplines and institutions to mingle and work together. Seven years is a long period, especially in the Information Age. The original vision didn’t bear out completely, but it was an interesting experiment leveraging then primitive web technologies and to have gathered a consistent crowd among the physicists and other scholars in the interdisciplinary domain.
Econophysics-inspired New Year thoughts

Hassan Masum (19 December 2004)

In the spirit of a New Year's resolution, consider the character of Econophysics itself. Two attributes of the field stand out: i) the application of careful and (where possible) rigorous modeling and simulation, to ii) questions of socio-economic systems...
Brian Arthur's Foreword to the <a HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0198566409/102-2111408-6206503?v=glance">Minority Game Book</a>

Brian Arthur (19 June 2004)

Once in a while a model problem appears that is simple to describe but offers a wealth of lessons. If the model problem is a classic — like the Ising model or the Prisoner’s Dilemma — it both opens up our insight and gives us analytical pathways into an intriguing world. Challet, Marsili and Zhang’s Minority Game problem is such a model. It is a classic
Human players are invited to challenge Minority Game players

Yi-Cheng Zhang (27 March 2003)

In the past few months we (Fribourg University econophysics group) have been testing an online interactive Minority Game that can be played around the globe via the World Wide Web. A human player is pitted against a few dozen adaptive MG players whose information capacity is very bounded, with an adjustable range---hence various levels of difficulty.