martedì 25 ottobre 2011

Facebook As Giant 'Lab' To Study Game

The results they are gathering will give them new insights into game theory, that little corner of mathematics where games and economics collide, and which can be found behind everything from corporate bargaining to the 1950s arms race.
11 images Gallery: Fan Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Adventures

Game theory essentially tells scientists what kind of biases people have and what they might do when their fate is determined by the choices of others. It can be useful in business, eg. when plotting a take-over, or politics, eg. figuring out which party wields the most power.

Microsoft’s Facebook game, called Project Waterloo, was designed by researchers at the company’s research lab in Cambridge, U.K., famed for its specialty in artificial intelligence and developing the initial technology behind the Xbox Kinect.

It’s a strategic battle game, similar to Risk, for two players who each start off with 100 troops. They must then allocate their soldiers among five battlefields and fight each other. The player who has won the most battles, and sussed out the other player the best, wins.

The free game was designed by programmer Mike Armstrong, and its creators, who include researchers Yoham Bachrach, 32, and Pushmeet Kohli, 29, hope they can eventually establish a Facebook Game Theory Lab. With more games they’ll carry out more experiments watching how thousands of people interact with their friends and strangers.

It’s a breakthrough process for the researchers, who in previous game theory experiments could only study about 35 people — the maximum number that could fit in their lab. Now they can reach many more. About a week ago, Project Waterloo already had 1,500 users, having been online for roughly a week.

“Imagine a lab experiment with 1,000 of people,” says Bachrach. “We can’t even fit 100 people in a single room in the lab. Here we’ve reached out to thousands of people. It’s a much bigger data set.”

“The studies in the past have been done on human subjects in a very restricted setting, mostly students from Harvard and MIT,” says Kohli, who did a PhD at Oxford and was introduced to game theory research by Bachrach, a specialist in artificial intelligence. “Because Facebook is so ubiquitous, we can really see the behavior across the world.”

The data they are collecting is “completely anonymous,” and doesn’t include age or gender, with the focus being more on the moves users make.

“Our hope is we are able to show a proof of concept,” says Kohli. “To see how people at large can play these games, that would entice other researchers to adopt this platform.”

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