Game Theory & Work | Day 2

My Introduction to Game Theory

Today wasn’t really eventful for me. I spent a bit of time reading this book on game theory. It doesn’t focus much on the mathematical aspects of it but instead attempts to deliver the explain the working principles of it. What I inferred from the text was that game theory tries to use a framework to predict how a person would act in events where multiple people were involved. The complication arises because a person normally acts in his own interests, multiple factors are at play and every decision has a unique tradeoff. This is what’s called playing a non zero-sum game. In these cases, any event which is the consequence of a decision may or may not yield extreme results from either end of the spectrum. A solution that they came up with to predict somebody’s actions was to examine how the person responds when the probability of a favourable outcome increases. We use these observations as a reference point and then measure the risk that comes with a certain decison. Then we try to make a more accurate prediction on how the player’s going to respond.

I thought that this was really interesting but I still don’t understand how this can work in a real world situation. The reason for this is that a lot of the variables don’t seem to be well defined and taking all of them into consideration seems impossible. But with that being said, I’m intrigued. I only got an overview and the book aims to provide insights to a beginner. So, I’ll probably go through the remaining parts of the book tomorrow and learn more about it. I really want to see instances of where it was used practically.

Reflection Time

Today wasn’t a really great day in terms of productivy at work in my opinion. I did go through Flask and how to connect it to a database and it was slightly easier to pick up because of my understanding of how Node works at the backend. But I fumbled as I tried to dive into the inticracies. This is a mistake I often make. When I’m learning something new, I try to learn everything in one go and that has never gone well. I do way better when I apply the concepts to smaller chunks of the task. However, nowadays, I’m able to catch myself in the act but it takes longer than I’d like to. The backend-related tasks that I’ll be assigned will be small so there was no point in learning extra parts. Also, I got a frontend task today and that got me excited. I realize that I’ve been getting better with frontend tasks and I can hold my weight there. But I’d like to start working on my backend skills too as they’re really weak. I think it’s really cool to be resourceful and maybe that’s why I’m so impatient.