Professor Ben Polak: Last time we talked a lot about the idea--I didn't mention the name but here's some jargon for you--we talked about the idea of deleting dominated strategies: looking at a game; figuring out which strategies are dominated; deleting them; looking at the game again; looking at which strategies are now dominated; deleting those; and so on and so forth.
This process is called the "iterative deletion of dominated strategies." This is not a great title for Barry's book.
You need to do better than that to get the two hundred and fifty dollars.
This is a boring title, but never mind.
Iterative Deletion of Dominated Strategies.
The idea is--It embodies the idea of putting yourself in someone else's shoes and trying to figure out what they're going to do, and then think about them putting themselves in your shoes, figuring out what you're going to do, and so on and so forth.
Last time, we saw already, that this is a very powerful idea, in that game last time.
But we also saw it's a dangerous idea to take too literally: that sometimes this can get you to over-think the problem and actually, as in that numbers game last time, the best choice, the winning choice, might not involve so many rounds.
We also saw in that numbers game last time that in some games, but by no means all games, in some games this process actually converges to a single choice.
In that numbers game it converged to 1.
