Here is a blog post that mirrors this post from two years ago and this post from last year.

As always, I will be using my blog to extend the class meetings my Game Theory class and I have.

Here are the results of the strategies played during the first game of matching pennies (see the previously mentioned posts for details):

We see that overall everyone seems to be playing randomly.

After that we played a modified version of the game (the row player has more to win by playing heads):

We now see that both players actually play heads less. This is perhaps easier to understand from the column player’s point of view.

I will leave an explanation as to what the green and yellow lines represent for a little longer…

The main point of this is to make sure that everyone understands the normal form game convention (by breaking the symmetry) and also to make it slightly more interesting (the row player now has more to win/lose by playing Heads).

Looking forward to the next class meeting where we will be doing similar things as we continue to understand the basics of normal form game representations.