Game theory for idiots

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Mixing moves In a football game, a penalty kicker who shoots the ball towards a goalkeeper will fail miserably since the keeper anticipates the direction the ball will go. Commitments This is played out in situations that need commitments. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Published by hkang Published October 15, October 16, Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Incentives come into play to encourage participants to maintain the protocol and avoid the Byzantine Generals Problem.

Miners are incentivized to be good actors on the network. If miners want to earn rewards, they have to abide by the rules. Otherwise, miners lose time, electricity, and processing power costs. This is because mining has a recursive punishment system. For example, a node controlled by a miner is free to go rogue and create an invalid block. The miner is deterred from doing this because other nodes that follow the same strategy will be punished and excluded from the system.

If a miner creates an invalid block, the other miners will simply ignore the invalid block and keep mining on the main chain. As a result, miners will choose the most stable state Nash Equilibrium. The system is Byzantine Fault Tolerant due to the majority of miners working in coordination to achieve and maintain the most stable state of the network at all times. And now, once again, after a rapacious Republican administration, Joe Biden and his Democratic congress must do it again.

He lacks delicacy, he lacks subtlety, and now, so do the Republicans. They used to be much better at this. These are tried and true strategies, but they are only the simplest manifestations of Game Theory. Think: the Cuban Missile crisis, the policy of mutually assured destruction MAD , or the global crisis of climate change.

They can all be explained by Game Theory. Politics is, above all else, a game of strategy. It is a system driven, not by the rationality of the players, but by the differential success of the strategies employed.

Our year-old liberal democracy produces what biologists refer to as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy ESS , where cooperation in the long run defines the dynamics of our system of governance. Democrats want that system back for many reasons, not the least of which is to reestablish predictability in our foreign and domestic policies and particularly in our economy.

Negotiating with Republicans over major progressive bills now in Congress has always been the ideal of our heretofore stable democracy. I suggest that we are playing Hawk-Dove — Chicken — and the Republicans expect Democrats to just give up and hit the brakes.