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

A huge apology for rushing and overrunning today. I know better and will make sure I don’t do that again.

A recording of the class is available here.

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.

After all this, we discussed what a game is (and I really appreciated the conversation we had here):

• A set of players
• A set of actions available to each player
• The outcomes of what each player can do.

Then we played the two thirds of the average game.

Here are how everyone played:

• First game: the average was 36.6.
• Second game: the average was 31.8.

Because I rushed this we did not have time to have much of a discussion. We will talk about this a bit more on Friday, including a question someone who guessed 100 asked at the end:

Is playing 100 to spoil the game a genuine thing?

That’s my rephrasing (so I apologise if I’m not quite repeating your words correctly!) but I will address this question a bit more on Friday.

Another person asked at the end of class:

“When should I get started on my coursework?”

My answer is essentially: you can start thinking about possible projects already but I’m aware you don’t have much of a definition of game theory yet. So I’d expect students to be able to come up with project ideas to discuss with me sometime towards the end of week 2 :)