Game theory: Prisoner’s Dilemma 1 Here comes the problem Have you heard of Prisoner’s dilemma? Well, it’s something that has come to have groundbreaking influence in modern mathematics, economics, biology and politics. There are various versions of Prisoner’s dilemma. In this article, I’d like to talk to you about just one variant of it: the non-iterated Prisoner’s dilemma. Two people have been caught by the police for a particular crime. They have been kept in two different rooms for interrogation. Now, they are put forward with a situation. They should both either confess the crime and thus get a reduced crime sentence as Reward for Cooperation, or both accuse each other and thus both get a major prison sentence as Punishment for Defection. However the main issue of dilemma isn’t still there. There is an another condition that makes the whole problem very interesting, at least for us observers. If ...
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We all must have heard about a popular story involving the great Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and his teacher during his school days. The story goes as: Gauss had a lazy teacher. The so-called educator wanted to keep the kids busy so he could take a nap; he asked the class to add the numbers 1 to 100. To the teacher's surprise, Gauss approached the teacher with his answer of 5050 so quick that the teacher thought Gauss cheated. Well you know sometimes, when you are so ahead of your time or things are too good, people don't believe in you. Anyway moving on, the formula which Gauss had found to get the answer was, S u m o f 1 t o n = n ( n + 1 ) 2 S o , S u m o f 1 t o 100 = 100 ( 100 + 1 ) 2 = 5050 This is one of the results which is widely known. Let's look at how this result can be formed intuitively using three methods. Method 1: ...