A webinar on “Game Theory” was conducted on August 16, 2020, on Microsoft Teams by the Department of Computer Science, School of Arts and Sciences, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Mysuru Campus, in alliance with the Computer Society of India for students. Nearly 100 participants attended the webinar. The resource person was Dr. Ganesh Neelakanta Iyer, Cloud Develops at Salesforce.

Introducing game theory to the attendees, Mr. Iyer described in brief various concepts like simultaneous, sequential, symmetric, asymmetric, perfect, imperfect, evolutionary, zero-sum, non-zero-sum, single shot with ample examples for each of them. The components of game theory – players, strategies, actions, payoffs and outcome, along with application domains of game theory were also touched upon during the session. Interestingly, a few were in the field of Economics like mergers and auctions, political science like public and political economy, some of them from Biology like foraging bees, a few from Sports like coaching staffs, pitch pass against sliders and lastly from Engineering namely AI, wireless and distributed systems.

Going further, he also specified the representations used in game theory like Normal form and Extensive form. Mr. Iyer also introduced the attendees to the non-cooperative games and their types such as static games like Coin matching, TCP back off, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Rock paper Scissor, Corona Time – Should I quarantine, and Forwarder’s Dilemma along with representations in matrix form and solutions to it. He also made it a point to explain Dynamic games using movies like chocolate wars that use equilibrium strategy, and Air force One, which best represents the tree structure, along with comparisons of various types of games.

The session ended on a promising note where Mr. Iyer provided the research scholars, students and other participants with detailed information about the future game theory, applications of Machine learning in games and art forms.