Game Theory: An Intuitive Art?
In searching for articles relevant to the course material, I stumbled upon an article about game theory, and how a recent study shows that chimpanzees may actually be better at analyzing opponents’ behavior and adjusting personal decisions than humans. This struck me as important because while humans may be studying game theory with numbers, figures, and numerous experiments, decision-making may be much more of an intuitive behavior – one that is possible to over-analyze and miss the intricacies that we might naturally pick up on. According to Wikipedia, game theory is “a study of strategic decision making”. As with any study, it is constantly evolving and expanding, but what if the best strategy in game theory is to follow intuition?
The fact that chimps have been shown to perform better in making decisions based on opponents’ strategies implies that although we can mathematically analyze choices and outcomes, decisions in game theory are probably more intuitive than that. If chimpanzees can actually predict opponents’ moves better than humans, either they are doing complicated calculations in their head, or they just feel what the other opponent will do. This brings up the question of the importance of personality and patterns in behavior in game theory. Specifically, will two different people make the same decisions, or will their personal feelings take precedent and change the way they behave? Further, does the way a single person behaves in one situation give us information about how he tends to behave in all situations, and should we in turn factor that into our decision? The chimpanzees seem to be doing this intuitively, according to the study published on the findings.
The study states: “The results are consistent with a tentative interpretation of game theory as explaining evolved behavior, with the additional hypothesis that chimpanzees may retain or practice a specialized capacity to adjust strategy choice during competition to perform at least as well as, or better than, humans have.” The chimps have a faster “learning rate”, or ability to adjust their strategies in real-time based on opponents’ decisions. Overall, the implications of these findings raise many interesting questions about the nature of game theory and the evolution of our senses and decision-making skills.