Game Theory

An excerpt from my homie's blog...

Background: He was at an ER conference and his residency program was competing against 5 others in a game of ER Jeopardy...

So, final jeopardy comes around, our team has 3000, the next closest has 2200. The subject is toxicology. One of our third years is going into toxicology. We start the victory celebration. Wager 1500.

Question: What mushroom toxicity requires vitamin B6 to blah, blah, blah?

No freaking clue. No problem. Everyone else is clueless too. Let's just put the one mushroom everyone knows and hope for the best. Of course, everyone gets it wrong, but Wash U, the 2200, bet nothing. Genius. i say genius because I know the guy who probably made that call and he was probably scheming the whole time. If they bet to win and knew the answer, we would probably know it too, and you could just pay attention to the game to judge that our knowledge was more or less equal. If they bet to win and got it wrong, whether we got it right or wrong, we would win. They could either bet to win, get it right and hope we got it wrong (less likely if they thought we were about equal) or bet nothing and hope the question is hard enough that everyone flounders. Genius.

Now that is game theory.