Seminar. Tomasz Kopczewski. “From Didactics to Discovery: Entropy Lab as a Proof-of-Concept for Modeling Uncertainty”

In this seminar, Tomasz Kopczewski (University of Warsaw) presents the interactive online tool “Entropy Lab”.

Entropy Lab began as a teaching tool for informational entropy and evolved into a proof-of-concept for modeling uncertainty. Participants interact with environments represented as Markov chains that share identical stationary distributions but differ in conditional entropy and predictability. By paying explicit prediction costs, they trade resources for uncertainty reduction, creating a Maxwell demon–like setting. Sudden regime changes test adaptation under Keynesian uncertainty. Running the experiment under additive and multiplicative payoff regimes reveals volatility drag and survival effects, where ensemble averages diverge from typical trajectories. The project combines entropy, information costs, and ergodicity into a simple but behaviorally transparent experimental environment.

This is an online event. We look forward to seeing you there!