Studying game theory from a game
Konrad Grabiszewski and Alex Horenstein, from University of Miami, developed games for smartphones in an attempt to learn about how people perceive and solve problems, and what types of problems are too difficult for some people to analyze. Specifically, using games that they have made they can analyze how people behave when using backward induction, a concept from game theory. Backward induction is when one has to look to “future options” to make decisions in the present. One such game that they made that involves backward induction is called “Blues and Reds”. It is a game that consists of 58 puzzles, where one player is the computer, and the other a human. In the game the computer and player take turns moving a ball through a puzzle, and the player wins if when the game ends the ball is on a blue circle rather than a red circle. In one version of the game called “Snowflake” a tree is shown which shows the possible outcomes from choices that the player could make in the game. Players use backward induction by looking at the possible outcomes in the tree and making a move that maximizes their chances of winning, or landing on a blue circle. The other version called “Rails” is the same but without any tree. It can be seen whether players are able to visualize the games as trees when playing the “Rails” version, and it can be seen how many players succeed when trees are presented to them in the “Snowflake” version.
This is related to class as the researcher’s games requires concepts from game theory to be solved. One concept that relates most to class are the diagrams used to show the choices and all of the potential outcomes called trees. In class we talked about the various strategies that a player could make and the possible payoffs or outcomes that result from the strategy that they play. Trees are able to show the outcomes that result from a set of strategies and then all the possible results that happen when all of the strategies are used on all of the outcomes from the first strategy chosen. In this way, the trees for strategies in games can grow exponentially which makes them challenging to work through. With already 10,000 participants in the study from 100 countries, it will be interesting to see how backward induction is used in both the “snowflake” version of games and “rails” version games.