Program Overview

Program Overview

The course focuses on multi-step imperfect-information games, which are common in real-world strategic settings. It covers the fundamentals and state-of-the-art techniques for solving such games, including signaling, deception, and understanding deception by others.

Course Structure and Evaluation

The course is lecture-based, with a few lectures dedicated to project presentations by students. Readings consist of a mixture of papers and course notes. Students complete a final project, which can be theoretical or experimental, and is evaluated based on the project proposal, write-up, and presentation.

• Grading:
  • 50% final project
  • 40% homework sets
  • 10% completion of readings, attendance, and participation in class discussions

Course Schedule

The course schedule is subject to change and includes the following topics:

1. Introduction to game theory and game representations
2. Representation of strategies in tree-form decision spaces
3. Regret minimization and hindsight rationality
4. Blackwell approachability and external regret minimization
5. Regret circuits and counterfactual regret minimization (CFR)
6. Provably correct techniques for speeding up CFR algorithms
7. Optimistic/predictive regret minimization via online optimization
8. Predictive Blackwell approachability
9. Predictive regret matching and predictive regret matching plus
10. Monte-Carlo CFR and offline optimization methods for two-player zero-sum games
11. Game abstraction
12. State-of-the-art for two-player no-limit Texas hold’em
13. State-of-the-art for multi-player no-limit Texas hold’em
14. “Endgame” solving without a blueprint strategy
15. Simulator-access games
16. Opponent exploitation
17. Equilibrium refinements
18. Correlated strategies and team coordination

Related Courses

The following related courses are offered by other professors:

• Economics, AI, and Optimization
• Foundations of Electronic Marketplaces
• Applied Mechanism Design for Social Good
• Artificial Intelligence Methods for Social Good
• Games, Decision, and Computation
• Topics at the Interface between Computer Science and Economics
• Computational Microeconomics: Game Theory, Social Choice, and Mechanism Design
• Multi-Agent Systems
• Truth, Justice, and Algorithms
• Security and Game Theory
• Algorithmic Game Theory