Game Theories
To: somebody at academia
I have some experience in applications of game theory having been fascinated by the concept in my teenage years and through applying it in a multitude of games. it is really a very simple complexity now, accepting that a nash equilbria exists for any formal model we choose to look at. I do however question the existence of an equilibrium in the formal sense, and in fact have recently been questioning the existence of nash equilibria altogether in games like rock paper scissors where there are unknowns in the equation. of course nash implies picking randomly, but this is not synanamous with nature as true randominity cannot be simulated by humans(and neither the compuers we've given birth to, as far as i know)
I've played poker for several years now, since i was fifteen, over the internet. I was studying game theory and in fact viewed your videos which were uploaded over youtube and learnt alot about how to think from them. I thank yourself and Yale for putting them up for free.
How can a game such as rock paper scissors have a true equilibrium? if you pick random then it shouldn't matter what i pick, i could pick rock the whole time i could pick a mixture of the three or whatever. but how do they interact with each other, on a deeper level, once we accept randomness doesn't exist? how does it affect the game when we have three players, all knowing that randomness is the long term equilbria but never being able to choose a truly random pattern distribution? for me it seems these sort of equilibriums boil down to more of a brute force, pychological and computational problem, and is similiar in ways to P versus NP.. but equilibrium only holds so long as the one watching us play, the shuffle mechanism in cards, the dice in backgammon, the randomness in rock paper scissors etc etc, holds true, a dictatorship over probability in a marxist fashion. but lets not pretend that it adds up.
Applications of game theory when introducing complex physics and quantum physics really starts to confuse things even more. I understand that the shuffle mechanism on pokerstars, a website i play on, uses quantum random number generators for the shuffling mechanism. It would then stand to argue that as we are part of the time it takes to make our actions, we are part of the game, we are part of the whole mechanisms and by understanding this and observing it, we should surely affect how the game is played, as quantum physics states observation affects. it's a laughable assertion though really because i don't for any second doubt quantum physics logicality whilst still feeling underwhelmed by how simple its assertions are. of course who we look at and how we look at them affects their response. that's basic socialization.
thought it would be good to reopen discussions. Will link OP later, and will also refrain from posting and let discussion flow freely, s I feel like that was my mistake previously. f this gets locked I will give up on forums, at least smp...
