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Hi. In this set of lectures, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about a
game called the Colonel Blotto game. Now there were two games that really got game
three into the mainstream from policy setting. The first one is the prisoner's
dilemma. We'll talk about that in the next set of lectures. The other is Colonel
Blotto. Now the Colonel Blotto game is a game that involves strategic mismatch. The
idea is you've got a set of troops, your opponent has a set of troops and you've
gotta figure out where do I allocate my troops given the other person. So, for
instance, if you think about the Battle of Waterloo. You've got two sets of troops.
You've got the British troops, you've got the French troops and they aligned them in
different fronts trying to find advantages. Or, if you look at Gettysburg,
you're gonna Of the confederate union army. Each one is placing their troops in
different locations. They were just having your strengths go against the weakness of
your opponent. This is what is what Blotto is trying to capture explicitly with
troops against fronts. What we're going to see in this lecture is that it's a very
frugal [inaudible] model, so it can be applied in a whole bunch of different
settings. So what are we gonna do in these lectures? We're gonna start out by
describing just the basic Colonel Blotto game Just the sort of vanilla version.
After that, we're gonna talk about what happens in Colonel Blotto if you give one
side an advantage. So one side has 100 troops, another side has 200 troops. How
much does it help you to have more troops? Then what we'll do is we'll sort of move
from that Colonel Blotto game and talk generally about models of competition. So
the previous set of lectures we talked about skill versus luck and this finite
memory lock model, And all this different models of success and outcomes. We now
have another one. Colonel [inaudible]. We'll see sort of how we can compare and
contrast all these different models of competition to get richer insights to
figure out who wins and wh o losses and why. Okay. So let's get started. What
we're going to do in the first lecture is talk about the basic game and see why
Colonel [inaudible] is so interesting across a variety of contexts.