Introducing strategies with matching pennies

Today we mainly talked about what a strategy was: defining it as a way of picking actions.

A recording of this class is available here: https://cardiff.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=17112445-87ad-493c-83d8-af9900c683e8

We did this by pairing up and playing two different games:

1. The traditional matching pennies game defined by the two payoff matrices: \(A=\begin{pmatrix}1 & -1\\-1 & 1\end{pmatrix}\) and \(A=-B\).
2. The modification of matching pennies which is the game defined by the two payoff matrices: \(A=\begin{pmatrix}2 & -2\\-1 & 1\end{pmatrix}\) and \(A=-B\).

For the second game there was some interesting discussion about which player might have an advantage: the row player or the column player? We wil revisit this.

There was one or two mentions of strategies where a player chose a particular atcion \(2/3\)rds of the time. If you are curious about what this might be, you can read ahead to the course chapter on best responses.

I briefly (because I’m an idiot and thought I had 10 less minutes than I did): showed how to define a game using nashpy. If you would like to download the notebook I wrote in class it is here.

Finally, I have added an FAQ about installing Python.