Required Reading

What I intend for this blog, is to lay out my thoughts on game theory and how it applies to darkfall, go over the strengths of different strategies to use, and once I've actually got the game use this as a journal of sorts to keep track of what happens in game and how that lines up with what I wrote beforehand. Hopefully I can eventually come to a useful conclusion or two.

In order to understand where I am coming from, it would be helpful if you know a little bit about game theory. So at the bottom of the post are some links that I would like to call 'required reading'.

Assuming that you are somewhat familiar, I would like to highlight what I think is most relevant. In the prisoners dilemma game, the 'Tit for Tat' strategy has been shown to be a stable and robust strategy. It is a stunningly simple strategy, all it does is cooperate on the first turn, then copy its opponents moves after that. despite being simple it has the 4 factors considered necessary for success. Here is an excerpt from wikipedia's page on the prisoners dilemma.

The best deterministic strategy was found to be "Tit for Tat," which Anatol Rapoport developed and entered into the tournament. It was the simplest of any program entered, containing only four lines of BASIC, and won the contest. The strategy is simply to cooperate on the first iteration of the game; after that, the player does what his opponent did on the previous move. Depending on the situation, a slightly better strategy can be "Tit for Tat with forgiveness." When the opponent defects, on the next move, the player sometimes cooperates anyway, with a small probability (around 1%-5%). This allows for occasional recovery from getting trapped in a cycle of defections. The exact probability depends on the line-up of opponents.

By analysing the top-scoring strategies, Axelrod stated several conditions necessary for a strategy to be successful.

Nice
The most important condition is that the strategy must be "nice", that is, it will not defect before its opponent does (this is sometimes referred to as an "optimistic" algorithm). Almost all of the top-scoring strategies were nice; therefore a purely selfish strategy will not "cheat" on its opponent, for purely utilitarian reasons first.

Retaliating
However, Axelrod contended, the successful strategy must not be a blind optimist. It must sometimes retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate. This is a very bad choice, as "nasty" strategies will ruthlessly exploit such players.

Forgiving
Successful strategies must also be forgiving. Though players will retaliate, they will once again fall back to cooperating if the opponent does not continue to defect. This stops long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximizing points.

Non-envious
The last quality is being non-envious, that is not striving to score more than the opponent (impossible for a ‘nice’ strategy, i.e., a 'nice' strategy can never score more than the opponent).

Therefore, Axelrod reached the oxymoron-sounding conclusion that selfish individuals for their own selfish good will tend to be nice and forgiving and non-envious.

This is wikipedia's page on game theory, I've read it but I don't recommend it as a place to start, use the other links first then maybe check this one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory


This page is more important, it is the page explaining the prisoners dilemma game, a lot of what I will be talking about revolves around prisoners dilemma situations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

This article is absolutely required, especially if you actually play games (plus you should enjoy it, it's a fantastic article). 'Playing to Win' by Sirlin, I have done what he describes in this article myself many times (put artificial limitations on myself) and I will outline one or two in a future post. Even now I still do it sometimes but at least now I am aware of it. Read this and stop being a scrub!
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-1.html

(also read parts 2 and 3)
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-2-mailbag.html
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-3-not-playing-to-win.html

Here is Amazons page for the book "The Evolution of Cooperation" By Robert Axelrod, it was my introduction to this topic and I heartily recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-Axelrod/dp/0465005640/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237754370&sr=8-1


Here is Amazons page for the book "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" By Matt Ridley. I wouldn't call this one 'required' but it's a fascinating read and does apply as his argument is basically that sex itself is a game that men and women compete in, and that the different strategies used by each sex optimize their chances of having offspring.
http://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0060556579/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237788142&sr=8-1