Hi. In this set of lectures, what we're
going to do is we're going to talk about a
game called the Colonel Blotto game. Now
there were two games that really got game
three into the mainstream from policy
setting. The first one is the prisoner's
dilemma. We'll talk about that in the next
set of lectures. The other is Colonel
Blotto. Now the Colonel Blotto game is a
game that involves strategic mismatch. The
idea is you've got a set of troops, your
opponent has a set of troops and you've
gotta figure out where do I allocate my
troops given the other person. So, for
instance, if you think about the Battle of
Waterloo. You've got two sets of troops.
You've got the British troops, you've got
the French troops and they aligned them in
different fronts trying to find
advantages. Or, if you look at Gettysburg,
you're gonna Of the confederate union
army. Each one is placing their troops in
different locations. They were just having
your strengths go against the weakness of
your opponent. This is what is what Blotto
is trying to capture explicitly with
troops against fronts. What we're going to
see in this lecture is that it's a very
frugal [inaudible] model, so it can be
applied in a whole bunch of different
settings. So what are we gonna do in these
lectures? We're gonna start out by
describing just the basic Colonel Blotto
game Just the sort of vanilla version.
After that, we're gonna talk about what
happens in Colonel Blotto if you give one
side an advantage. So one side has 100
troops, another side has 200 troops. How
much does it help you to have more troops?
Then what we'll do is we'll sort of move
from that Colonel Blotto game and talk
generally about models of competition. So
the previous set of lectures we talked
about skill versus luck and this finite
memory lock model, And all this different
models of success and outcomes. We now
have another one. Colonel [inaudible].
We'll see sort of how we can compare and
contrast all these different models of
competition to get richer insights to
figure out who wins and wh o losses and
why. Okay. So let's get started. What
we're going to do in the first lecture is
talk about the basic game and see why
Colonel [inaudible] is so interesting
across a variety of contexts.