General Interest Meeting (March 25th, 2025)
For our first meeting we had icebreakers in the form of a math game. The game in question was Colonel Blotto or Blotto. We played it by doing the following things:
- Everyone gets into random teams of 2 or 3 and names themselves.
- Each team is handed 6 “resources."
- When two teams are battling, they will battle for fields.
- Each team will describe (in secret) how much of each resource they will put on a field.
- Whoever has more resources on a field wins that field. For example, if team A has 5 resources on field 1 and team B has 1 resource on field 1, team A wins field 1.
- Whichever team has more fields won at the end of a round, wins the game; the team who wins 2 out of 3 games gets to go onto the next round under the winner’s bracket.
- For the final game, it will be the winner of the losing bracket vs. the winner of the winning bracket. The total number of resources will halved for each team’s total resources.
After playing a game, you can discuss the math or try repeating the game with different numbers of resources.
The mathematics behind this game is as follows. With 6 resources the winning strategy is (3, 3, 0) because you either get a draw or you get a win. With resources above 12, there is no one winning strategy anymore because there are 3 sets which counteract each other with 1/3 probability; in other words, once you know the 3 numbers it is like playing rock, paper, scissors with those resources. Of course, if we change properties of these resources such as their effectiveness per field, the number of fields, or the number each team gets (team A has 10 and team B has 9) the math changes considerably. If you’re interested in learning more about this, consider looking up the Blotto Game.
After we discussed the winning strategy for this game, since this was the first meeting, we asked the students if there was anything that they would like to see in future club meetings.
If there are any students interested in learning more about the Blotto game, they should consider reading the following:
