The Evolution of Trust (2017)

I enjoyed playing through this.

Once you play through this, you can go back to *2. Repeated games* and get the highest score against all the different opponents – But you must know who you are dealing with.

• The copycat, never cheat them until the last round.

• The always-cheat, don't ever play with them at all (you will lose a coin guaranteed).

• Always-cooperate, cheat them each round, they won't learn.

• Grudger don't cheat these guys either, until the last round.

• Detective is slightly strange. You cheat him first three rounds, then cooperate. From there, cooperate another two times, then cheat on the last round. You play against the detective for more rounds than the other characters.

The detective at first sounded promising, but the way the detective is worded means that they won't capitalize on always-cooperate by cheating them, they just turn into copy cats after the 4th interaction.

Sometimes I wonder if the novels we write about friendship and betrayal is just game theory writ into our collective storytelling.

This game is my favorite thing on the internet. It is an amazing cause and effect explanation of a complex concept brought to a simple level. In a world where it feels like tech is ripping apart our social fabric Nicky Case (ncase) has shown us what tech can do to help mend it.

If you clicked on this page hoping for a discussion or having skipped the game, the game is really worth playing.

Here is some more of Nicky Case's stuff like this: https://explorabl.es/social/

I used this once as a subject for a retrospective. The team would play through the game together and make the guesses as to what would happen.

Afterwards we ended up playing against each other using some poker chips. It was a lot of fun and though it was clear that trust did not make you a winner, we might have ended up with a little more of it in the team afterwards.