Structure of the class and the two thirds of the average game

Thanks all today for a fun class!

A recording of the class is available here (if the video/audio quality can be better please tell me).

In class we spoke about the general structure of the class and you can find that information here: https://vknight.org/gt/topics/about-the-course.html.

I have added an assessment page with:

The marking criteria
A list of titles of projects from last year (thank you to the student who suggested this: great idea).

Please don’t feel constrained at all by the titles from last year: if you have an idea you would like to work on come and speak to me and I’m sure we can find a way to make it work.

We agreed I think? that you have until Friday the 10th of February to form your own student groups.

ACTION REQUIRED:

If you do not have a group by the end of Friday the 10 of February I will create a group for you.

Once you have created a group, 1 member of your group must email me (CC’ing in all other members) with subject: “GAME THEORY Group formed”

In the email please tell me the name of your group (you can be imaginative), everyone’s name and student number and also which member of your group is the point of contact.

I also added an FAQ that a few students approached me for during class regarding how their programming ability might affect their performance in the class. Here is my answer:

The programming required to complete this course is mainly making calls to the Nashpy library. There is little to no writing of your own algorithms or code required. Historically, students who have been concerned about this have not been impeded by their programming ability.

After all this, we played the two thirds of the average game.

Here are how everyone played:

Results of the first two thirds of the average game: the average was 42.8.
Results of the second two thirds of the average game: the average was 23.5.

We discussion we had around this was great and neat that someone suggested that if we kept playing we would potentially arrive the theoretic equilibrium of everyone playing 0.

Note I called “everyone play 0” an equilibrium because if everyone plays 0 everyone would win and so no one has a reason to play something different. This concept will be revisited in future chapters (it’s a big deal).

I ended the class by briefly describing the 3 things that make up a “Normal Form Game”:

Players (you were all the players in the game today)
Actions (your available actions were to choose an integer from 0 to 100)
Outcomes (the winners were those who guessed closest to 2 / 3rds of the average guess).

You can read more about this at the relevant chapter of the course text: https://nashpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/text-book/normal-form-games.html

You can find links to videos of me lecturing that chapter here: http://vknight.org/gt/topics/normal-form-games.html.