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Trumping Tit-for-Tat

I can hardly be considered a student of William Riker, but his course on Strategy in Politics was one that I remember vividly and actually occasionally refer back to when I get into arguments about our current electoral system. So I was shocked to learn that there is a new strategy for winning the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Challenge, one that trumps the Tit-for-Tat strategy that we learned about under Prof. Riker's tutelage.

If you're actually intrigued by this, there's plenty of good background information on the classic Prisoner's Dilemma game theory puzzle and the Tit-for-Tat strategy (which can be distilled into "do unto others as they have already done unto you," or even further distilled into, um, "tit-for-tat").

Note that the winning Southampton strategy requires several actors cooperating together, sacrificing many participants for a privileged few. While that may seem to be "cheating," the whole point of the competition is to create a laboratory for simulating and testing human behavior. Check out the Freedom to Tinker blog (particularly the comments) for more insight on the competition and how the results may be applied to real-world decision-making.

If you're eyes haven't glazed over yet, you might be interested learn how game theory might be applied on the campaign trail and why the candidates seem to be running around like headless chickens through the battleground states.

And no, dangit. I'm not talking about that William Riker.