Lenz Pracher

Incoming Stanford Physics PhD Student supported by the Stanford Graduate Fellowship. I'm grateful to be advised by Surya Ganguli. M.Sc. Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at TUM/LMU currently focussing on Physics of (Machine) Learning in the Rulands Group. I have worked at Quantco as a working student and intern and have held positions as visiting researcher at the Harvard University Mathematics and the Hokkaido University Information Science and Technology Department. I have obtained my B.Sc. in Physics at TUM.

Projects

• From simultaneous to leader–follower play in direct reciprocity
  Foreknowledge can be very useful to finding good strategies
  P LaPorte, L Pracher, S Pal — PNAS Nexus 5 (2), pgag005 — 2026

• Strategies of cooperation and defection in five large language models
  LLMs have certain strategic preferences
  S Pal, A Mallela, C Hilbe, L Pracher, C Wei, F Fu, S Schnell, MA Nowak — arXiv:2601.09849 — 2026

• LOCO: Abstracting Spectral Numerical Integrators for PDEs into Neural Operators
  We can gain some performance by adjusting the Fourier Neural Operator.
  L Pracher, T Matsubara

• Evolutionary processes that resolve cooperative dilemmas
  Simple update rules can yield surprising behaviour
  P LaPorte, S Wang, L Pracher, S Pal, M Nowak — 2025

Contact

Email: lenz.pracher"at"gmail.com