This intro to mean field theory seems to be pointing to a similar concept of a “foreground” particle and a “background”, where the background is made of the interaction of lots of little “foreground” particles, but each particle has negligible impact on the background; you can just model the particle’s behavior as some function of the (assumed approximately fixed) background. But I don’t really know mean field theory in physics so I can’t be sure the analogy is apt.
I think the more precise formalism here is mean-field games, which studies how a large popul... (read more)
I think the more precise formalism here is mean-field games, which studies how a large popul... (read more)