In game theory, generalists sometimes win out over specialists

Whether you’re playing poker against a single opponent or find yourself in a bidding war over a home purchase with another prospective buyer, you are operating under conditions of imperfect information. You know what cards you’re holding in the poker game, and you also know how much above the home’s asking price you can afford, but you don’t know your opponent’s hand in the card game or how high the other home buyer is willing to go.

A paper co-authored by MIT researchers and presented in April at the International Conference on Learning Representations in Rio De Janeiro won’t tell you what to do in these situations, specifically. But it does offer new insights into so-called imperfect-information games that involve two contestants facing off in a “zero-sum” competition, where one player’s gain means the other player’s loss.

MIT researchers on the project include Sobhan Mohammadpour, a PhD student in MIT’s...

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