Ready Player One: Beating Cancer With Game Theory
This article relates to our discussion in Networks of Game Theory. There are a few game setups in this article. For the first, the players are cancer and the body’s immune system. Unfortunately in this case, the body’s immune system strategy is to battle the cancer. However, the cancer is able to always employ its dominant strategy of simply attacking and growing until the tumor for instance on the person’s body grows large enough that the human notices and goes to the doctor. The next game entails the players as the cancer and the doctor. The initial strategy is for the doctor, player 1, to aggressively attack the cancer with drugs in hopes to entirely wipe out the cancer, player 2, before it can recover and continue spreading. Sometimes this strategy is successful and the patient is cancer free and can go back to his/her normal life. However, most of the time, this strategy isn’t effective and the cancer spreads, resulting in player 2 winning. Because this game normally ends with cancer winning, researchers have been developing strategies to give humans a larger chance to beat cancer. The new hypothesized theory is to rather than employ strong massive amounts of drugs from the start in hopes the cancer is wiped out, employ a strategy to force the ever evolving cancer cells to reveal their true colors and plans to allow doctors to block their plans.
In class we discussed for game theory, we assume both players are rational and will make the best decision for themselves. In addition, players make their decisions simultaneously and not in response. In the case of cancer, Player 1 (the doctor) is the only rational player, as Player 2 (the cancer) adapt their strategy and decide as they go, make this model more complicated. Because of this, cancer is always able to make its best move based off what Player 1 employs. In previous treatment methods, doctors would continue a treatment if it was working well; however, with this strategy, cancer was able to evolve and understand how to change such that the cancer would not be exterminated. With future forward thinking, doctors are able to employ leading-strategies using the cancer’s reaction to the planted treatment to intelligently predict cancer’s retaliation and be one step ahead. In doing so, doctor’s can now anticipate cancer’s move and employ the dominant strategy to allow their patient to be cancer free. In this article, this future-thinking vs old strategy is compared to rock paper scissors. The old strategy was to have the doctor play scissors seeing that it was a particular cancer that played paper. However, after a few go’s, the cancer is able to evolve and detect the doctors were employing scissors and it should play rock as it was a dominant strategy. Now, doctors will be able to anticipate the cancer’s move and employ the most effective choice of rock-paper-scissors.
http://fortune.com/2018/08/10/beating-cancer-game-theory/