Ever heard of The Hunger Games? Here’s what it’s about: there are 12 districts in a city and two contestants from each district are randomly chosen to participate in the annual hunger games. The goal of the hunger games: kill the other contestants and live till the end to win. A bit brutal, I know. However, if the contestants learnt about game theory and applied it, they would have a better judgement of which tactics to use for survival.
Naturally, each person’s strategy would depend on their intuition of what the opponent’s will do. Especially when its life or death. Food, water and sleep is essential for one to survive and stay alert. However, sleeping makes one vulnerable to being killed by someone awake. So, the strategy is to either sleep and potentially get killed by someone who didn’t sleep or don’t sleep and kill the others that slept. However, you could also have the case that everyone slept and everyone is well rested or, no one slept and everyone is tired. Here is a simple matrix to represent the strategies:
The issue is clear for every contestant: being tired is better than getting killed but, not sleeping for days would give you a disadvantage to rested opponents. It is still more appealing to stay awake because, regardless of being tired, staying awake while others sleep is an easy way to kill them. However, the characters still choose to get sleep even though it is not the best tactic. Why? It’s simple. In the long run, enough sleep allows one to be more energized to hunt for food and water and kill the others when awake.
There is no ‘right’ tactic in this theory as this translation is less comprehensive because the human factors are not taken into consideration. For example, dying of exhaustion, losing a fight due to the tiredness, the weapons one may have, could all play a significant role in how one would survive. Regardless, to think how a well-defined game can be used to make such an important survival decision is incredible and terrifying! What tactic would you choose?
Sources:
- Hunger Games survival analysis: http://www.bdkeller.com/writing/hunger-games-survival-analysis
- Probability and Game Theory in the Hunger Games: https://www.wired.com/2012/04/probability-and-game-theory-in-the-hunger-games/