Do you remember this legendary sentence from Bruce Lee – ‘Boards don’t hit back !’.
Well, he himself may have meant it otherwise, this sentence had a profound importance in the field of Mathematics and Deep Data Science.
Most decisions from our everyday life to business and War strategies are majorly dependent how other parties are behaving.
And thus most practical interactions are not with boards but with other parties whom we cannot predict how they will react to different scenarios.
And thus comes the concept of game theory.
The official definition is - the branch of mathematics concerned with the analysis of strategies for dealing with competitive situations where the outcome of a participant's choice of action depends critically on the actions of other participants. Game theory has been applied to contexts in war, business, and biology.
And something that we are currently lacking as a data science community is we predict stuffs considering people around us will behave rationally or predictively, which is not always the right assumption.
That is why it is so difficult or impossible to predict an election or stock market.
Few major contributors towards this field are - John von Neumann and John Nash.(The one from beautiful mind).
So the key takeaway for the team - is with time you will get more exposure to predictions, functions and recommendations from machines. But understand it is an indicator not an exact science. Because it’s very difficult to predict how the other parties are going to behave in both competitive or co-operative platform.
Below is a very good write up on afghan conflict in the context of game theory.