Plotting Pokémon Go's success

Since the popular game came out this past summer, the number of videos about it on YouTube has skyrocketed. In a demonstration of the incredible power of network modeling, Kirell Benzi, a PhD student at EPFL, catalogued them all and plotted them in a 3D interactive table. Math is providing us with some new tools made possible by advances in computing power and developments in the field of artificial intelligence. They can do what the human brain cannot: quickly and accurately process huge amounts of digital information, such as the content of thousands of pages of webpages devoted to the same topic, data collected by a telescope observing a distant galaxy and the reactions of social media users. In addition to sorting and structuring all this information, these algorithms can give it visual shape - using graph theory - to help us interpret it. Kirell Benzi, who is finishing his doctoral thesis at EPFL's Signal Processing Laboratory (LTS2), puts these tools to work to reveal new and often surprising patterns. After discovering unsuspected dimensions of the Star Wars saga , he is now focusing his analytical acumen on Pokémon Go.