Managing Your Bag of Tricks (How to Decide between Known and Unknown Strategies)

Each time a strategy is employed, it’s predictive success rate changes. In Rock, Paper, Scissors a successful prediction is worth 1, while an unsuccessful prediction is worth 0 or -1. If success rate is (Cumulative prediction value)/(Number of predictions), where each evaluated prediction increments the (Number of Predictions) +1 and the value of the prediction increments the (cumulative prediction value) +1, -1, or 0, then even a value-neutral prediction leads to a more accurate success rate.

What’s a Game and How Do You Beat It?

This came out in a rush tonight, a dreadfully annoying rush that kept me from getting any reasonable amount of sleep. But still, here it is. Dunno if anything here is new ground or interesting to anyone already familiar with game theory, but it was definitely new ground for me this evening. A dizzying spiral of though prompted by some of my Austin friends discussing A.I.’s built to play Rock, Paper, Scissors (Thanks, Jeff Meyerson, Chris Mabry, Tony Ho, and Nick Lavender). As I worked my way through, much of the material seemed applicable to a Magic and maybe I’ll address that in the future. But right now, finally, I think I can sleep. Probably gonna edit this post later too, get it into tighter shape and shit.

A game exists when one or more players believe they can make strategic choices that perform better than random choice long-term. A game ceases to exist when all players no longer believe they can outperform random choice long-term. This is not to say short-term randomness can not be utilized by a player in a game. In fact, short-term randomness is the default position when none of a player’s strategies suggest a non-ambiguous choice. If the player devises a new strategy to resolve the ambiguity, randomness is avoided and the player is still playing. Also, as long as the player believes that their short-term randomness will produce information that yields a strategic choice that player is still playing the game. It should not be assumed that a player is not acting strategically just because they are being outperformed by random choice. As long as a player believes they can and endeavors to outperform random choice, they are playing the game.