Last week we introduced repeated games by playing an iterated prisoners dilemma tournament in class. This post, mirrors this similar one from last year.

The basic idea is for students to split in to 4 teams and play a repeated iteration of the following game:

The teams play 5 rounds (which is slightly different to last year).

This year (as very often happens) two coalitions formed at the end of the tournament as there was a box of chocolates on offer.

You can see the results of each duel and overall in the following photo:

Results of the tournament

Because of the coalitions we had to use a tie breaker (which you can see in the tiny bottom right corner of the board): a game of Rock Paper Scissors Spock which A won on behalf of “BatDuck”.

Some teams told me afterwards that there were planning on playing TitForTat but as they didn’t declare this, given the small number of rounds it didn’t have time to become evident (I suspect).

Overall, team “Kev” played rather poorly, seemingly trying to Defect to often and winning their duels but getting low schools. In contrast to this team “Sheilla” cooperated to help build up their reputation. Sadly their coalition (with team “Kev”) lost the tie breaker :)

This iterated prisoners dilemma tournament in class is closely related to some of my ongoing work which is the Axelrod project python library.