Strategic Bullying

Dennis Shasha

Omniheurist Course

Computer Science


 

Description

A similar game to this appeared in CACM.

A Strategic Bullying setup consists of a bunch of agents A1, ..., Ak such that each agent Ai has power Pi and initial wealth (in gold equivalent) of Pi. Agents can form coalitions whose power is the sum of the powers of the agents in the coalition. A coalition may consist of a single agent. An agent may be in only one coalition at a time.

A coalition can challenge a single agent or a coalition. The challengee can then seek to form a new coalition. Then the challenger can decide to engage (i.e. go to war) or disengage.

If the challenger goes to war, then if either side has more power, then the other side is wiped out and the losing side's wealth is distributed to the winning coalition in proportion to each agent's power in that coalition. If neither side has more power, then there is no war. If the challenger has less power, then the challenger would be foolish to go to war, but if there is a war, the challenger is wiped out.

Each team in a competition will represent an agent. In a move, an agent A can perform one of three mutually exclusive action packages. Moves alternate among agents. All actions of an agent are announced to the world (another variant is to allow secrecy).

Architecture

The architecture team will inform each agent when that agent can move, of the global state of coalitions, the state of each agent in terms of wealth, and to be sure that no agent makes a disallowed move. The architecture team will also visualize the game.