It’s about modeling agents making decisions, not game design. 🙂 – EB

…but you can also apply game theory to game design. – KS

Yvain’s sequence of posts introducing Game Theory

Defecting is MADE OF FIRE

Wikipedia on Dr. Axelrod’s Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament

Over the years the Less Wrong community has run a few PD tournaments of their own, with some variation.

2011 Standard evolutionary tournament

2013 tournament with visible source code (set up, and results)

2014 tournament with opponent-simulation

Punishing the cooperators! Who would do that??

(Eneasz: my explanation for why this is done may have been off – I was mixing it up with the “Insulting The Meat” practice I’d recently read about)

Learn about Evolutionary Game Theory from chapter 7 of this online book!

Patent Trolls. Eneasz hates them. The Patent Troll Episode of This American Life may make you hate them too, if you don’t already.

The Planet Money episode on the body-builder supplement patent troll. Or read a summary at NPR.

The story of the Phoebus cartel, a group of light bulb manufacturers who conspired to reduce light bulb life.

The best Golden Balls Split or Steal



“The Button” a parody of The Box with Cameron Diaz (not Jennifer Lopez) which is based on a short story called, “Button, Button.”



Eliezer Yudkowsky on Newcomb’s Problem, and on The True Prisoner’s Dilemma