How to Win with Game Theory & Defeat Smart Opponents | Kevin Zollman | Big Think

How to Win with Game Theory & Defeat Smart Opponents
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If you want to win, it's best to think crazy like a fox. Nobody knows this better than Kevin Zollman - a nationally recognized expert in game theory and associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University - who suggests that perhaps the best way to get ahead of your opponent is to think completely counterintuitively. This works especially well in poker, where breaking the flow (say, bluffing when you have nothing) can keep your foes from guessing your next move. A little dose of crazy goes a long way. Zollman is the co-author of The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting: How the Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal with the Toughest Negotiators You Know - Your Kids, with Paul Raeburn.
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KEVIN ZOLLMAN:
Kevin Zollman is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also an associate fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, visiting professor at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (part of Ludwig-Maximilians Universität), and an associate editor of the journal Philosophy of Science. His research focuses on game theory, agent based modeling, and the philosophy of science. Zollman is the co-author of The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting: How the Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal with the Toughest Negotiators You Know--Your Kids, with Paul Raeburn.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Kevin Zollman: When one is confronted with a situation that’s truly zero sum where one party is going to win and the other party is going to lose, a situation is very complicated and sometimes difficult to analyze. Game theory spent much of its early days analyzing zero sum games and trying to figure out what’s the best strategy.
It’s a little complicated because it depends critically on how sophisticated you think the other party is.
If they’re very, very, very smart, the chances that you’re going to outthink them are not very high. In such a situation often times the best strategy is very counterintuitive, because it involves flipping a coin or rolling a dice or doing something random.
Professional poker players know this and they often times advocate in poker strategy books that one should occasionally do something completely counterintuitive in order to keep your opponents off guard. And in fact game theory has shown that this is good, solid, mathematically well-founded advice, that often times what you want to do is engage in a kind of random strategy-game theorists call this a mixed strategy-in order to make sure that your opponent can’t get the leg up on you.
The nice thing about these random strategies is that they ensure that your opponent can never outthink you. So even if you think your opponent is a little smarter than you or a little bit more sophisticated than you or has a little bit more information than you do, the fact that you’re being random to a certain extent means that they can’t outthink you.
Now how do you figure out how to be random? I’m not saying just flip a coin all the time or whatever. What game theorists have figured out is that in zero sum games the best strategy to pursue when you’re against a sophisticated opponent is to adopt the strategy which minimizes your maximum loss. This is sometimes called the mini max strategy.
So the idea is you think: what’s the worst case scenario for me? What could my opponent do that would make me worse off?
And then you figure out what’s the best strategy against that, so you’re minimizing your maximum loss.
Game theorists prove that if you use this way of thinking, minimizing your maximum loss, you ensure that no matter how sophisticated your opponent is you’ve guarded against the worst case scenario. And not only that but in zero sum games you’ve done the best you can possibly do.
That’s not true in games that aren’t zero sum, so one has to be very careful about employing this strategy, because if you’re mistaken and you’re not in a zero sum interaction you could end up ruining it for everybody. But if you’re truly in a zero sum interaction this is one of the strategies that you can use.
Now suppose that you’re dealing with an opponent who’s not sophisticated, you are smarter than they are, there it depends very much on: how smart are they? Can you outthink them? And what’s the individual interaction that you’re engaged in?
So...
For the full transcript, check out bigthink.com/videos/kevin-zol...

[@bigthink]

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[@albertofrantz310]

“If I don’t know what I’m doing, the enemy won’t know either!”

[@ebinnisti1769]

Also: if you repeat your overpowered tactic in game, your enemy will learn from you and probably turn the tables. This is why you should do something "random" once in a while, so they lose their concentration on your tactic

[@anothrdude]

I once beat a guy 10 times in a row at rock paper scissors. I was on fire, but the 6th win I was basically just reading his mind, so confident. It has never happened again, I've tried but I'm just normal, but that dude is out there and he carries his defeat with him

[@Stickyrolls123]

The art of war is the art of deception. I'm a student of history and spend a lot of my time reading about the great generals of the ages. This is one thing they all have in common. When placed in a situation where defeat looks inevitable, do something crazy and unexpected. It's been said by many people through history that a good general is lucky. After watching this and thinking about the things I just said, I don't think they meant just naturally "lucky" but instead they were willing to take calculated chances when they needed to.

[@wawathulu5637]

I flip a coin for everything in life. Can't let god catch on to my strategy.

[@henriquemachi8401]

i'm here watching this video because i wanna learn how to win an argument with my gf

[@dpgol88]

This is exactly how the Joker defeats Batman!

[@SoultoSample]

Who’s here after Squid Game?

[@layoutarchitect]

Who else came here after losing many games

[@janofb]

As a kid I used to beat my Grandfather at Chess by making crazy moves. He always thought he had missed some play and it threw him off.

[@AllenLinnenJr]

Ferengi rule of acquisition 76:

[@superdude292]

I wrestled in high school and I noticed that when I would wrestle someone who wasn’t a wrestler it felt very weird and awkward. I could always win but sometimes I would go for a move and be met with a knee or elbow in my face that shouldn’t be there. Or I would execute a move with much more force than was needed because my opponent wasn’t resisting it at all and I would lose my balance. I imagine this is an example of what this video is explaining.

[@jt95124]

At my poker game, the regulars were very good players. You could read them and it would be accurate and most of the time they did what was best for them, so you could figure out where they are. Sometimes we had a beginner come and play. You couldn't read them because they didn't know where they were, and you couldn't interpret their actions to figure out where they were because they didn't know the "right" (game theory) thing to do. They frequently won. The second time they played, they had experienced getting bushwhacked, began to understand, and then they did very badly.

[@ashandwit]

Being a bit unpredictable: when I was a kid on a baseball team, we were playing opponents who had a really good pitcher; two balls, two strikes on me, I decide to SWING at the next pitch, regardless--- it was a high pitch, that was going to be a ball, BUT, I swung anyways. It caught them off guard, and was a nice line drive. We got a double out of it.

[@mellamobob]

So basically, don't let your opponent get the hard reads.

[@harshshah2549]

That's what meta is in games. The best strategy is the best until either others start using it, or others start countering it. Thus, the meta always changes to be whatever counters the best currently available strategy.

[@justinbailey2419]

Random things to keep an opponent off guard might work sometimes, but if your opponent is good enough your lack of planning will only show you as disorganized and ultimately might lead to your defeat. Depends on the type of game I guess really, doing a bunch of random moves in chess might help but in my experience you win more games by thinking as many steps ahead as you can.

[@albertohuerta5763]

Min-max strategy seems like little finger's philosophy in game of thrones

[@colomtnhigh77]

Fantastic video, thank you!