Game Theory

For any of you out there who have an interest in strategy, game theory, prisoner’s dilemma, etc… here’s a scenario to think about:

My friend Lester is coming to visit this weekend after a long semester at Tulane Medical School. And, after a nice brunch with the rest of the NextGen gang, and right before a nice reunion dinner with a group of friends, he, my roommate Eric, Jen, and Buck will engage in something that gets to the root of our relationships: Starcraft

Ok, for those of you who don’t know, Starcraft is a Real Time Strategy Game — meaning that it’s not like Doom or Pacman — you act as essentially a general who is dropped into the middle of hostile territory and you must collect supplies/resources and allocate them effectively so that you can destroy the enemy. The “real time” means that you can’t have everyone else wait while you make up your mind — you have to go as fast as the game does, or you’ll be screwed.

Now, normally, we would do a 5 vs 3 game (5 of us versus 3 computer-run players[the computer controls 3 generals]) or to spice things up a bit a 3 v 2 v 3 (3 of us vs 2 of us versus 3 computers) but Lester and I came up with a brilliant little twist on the idea.

The game is this: there will be 5 of us human players and 3 computer players. the computer players are indiscriminate and see all of us as enemies. They will also all ally up to destroy us. But, instead of it being a simple humans versus artificial intelligence setup, each one of us (the human players) will be randomly assigned a target (another human player). The winner of this game is the person who’s target is the first to die. In other words, if Lester is assigned to kill Eric and Eric dies before any other human player dies, Lester wins. Even if its because Eric gets killed by the computer or kills himself, Lester wins.

One of the first objections I heard to the game was that there would be absolutely no cooperation. I don’t see this is true for three reasons.

1. The first is that there is a very powerful common enemy who doesn’t care about who has who as a target. And history shows that alliances get formed when enemies have a common enemy (ie, Greek city-states versus Persia).
2. The second reason is that, taking the example above, if Jen dies, I, Eric, and Buck will all lose. We won’t accept that, and we will do the bare minimum needed to just keep Jen alive.
3. Probably the most important reason (and the reason why I think the idea of this game is so fascinating even if in practice it might not be) is that nobody amongst us 5 is good enough to take down multiple people at once. Sure, there is definitely a hierarchy of skill and there is definitely going to be some strategies and positions that do better in a 1-on-1 battle, but none of us is good enough to take down everyone and hence there will be alliances formed.

So, the big question: what do you do to win? Who do you ally yourself with? How do you show your ally that you’re harmless. When do you turn on your ally? Should you follow an offensive strategy against the computer? A bluff attack against someone who’s not your target? A purely defensive strategy? How do you deal with someone attacking you?

This is similar to the game Diplomacy, except it’s real-time.There are no discrete turns, everything is continuous. What do you do?