With this strategy, the adversaries cannot predict which checkpoint is unmanned.

Using game theory, Prof Tambe and his students accounted for all possible factors to develop the best strategy - patrolling three randomly chosen checkpoints daily. The challenge lies in the fact that the patrol teams and criminals cannot reason about their opponents’ next move. In this scenario, there are eight checkpoints but only three patrol teams. They used the Los Angeles Airport and its checkpoints as the stage and patrol teams and criminals as the players. In 2007, Professor Millind Tambe and his students from the University of Southern California (the former is now at Harvard University) applied game theory concepts to public safety in an experiment. Since the theoretical framework was coined, mathematicians, economists, and computer scientists have applied it to real-world situations, such as modelling economic scenarios, computational interactions, and consumer pricing strategies. These studies formed the foundation for game theory as we know it today. In the 1940s, mathematicians began researching optimal strategies to win games.

“Similarly, you can use your intuition from game playing and a little bit of math to design security allocation schemes for real-world problems.” 'When I started my PhD, I was dazzled by how strategy games and mathematics come together,' recalls Prof Sinha, who is also a Lee Kong Chian Fellow at SMU. Such games require players to strategise against opponents and lead their armies to victory. Prof Sinha first developed an interest in gaming strategies when he played popular strategy games such as Age of Empires as a student. As such, computer science and machine learning now play a critical role in game theory, as the analyses of most real-world games are beyond human capabilities. The greater the game's complexity, the more effort is required to reason and decide the best strategic move. Much like the centuries-old chess game, game theory abides by the principles whereby your moves are directly affected by that of your opponent.Īt the recent World Expo 2020 in Dubai, SMU Assistant Professor of Computer Science Arunesh Sinha shed light on the importance of game theory in analysing modern-day situations during his presentation, Real World Decision Making using Game Theory.įor example, real-world security problems may be considered a “game” dependent on the behaviour of involved parties, albeit with much higher stakes. In the 1940s, mathematician Jon von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern developed game theory, a technique used to analyse complex situations.

Using game theory in real life